PLANETARY DUALITY

For anyone with an eye on this album, get ready for a brutal technical experience. This album is filled with blastbeats, complex time changes, deep death growls, and technical guitars. In fact, there's not too much to get most fans to keep listening. Even after several listens, most of this album will seem like a blur, since there is very little in the way of melody or memorable riffs.

However, one will get to know the sounds of certain tracks. If a track could be described as memorable on this album it would probably be The Ancient Covenant with a killer bass intro and quick arpeggios sewn through it.

Of course, there's Shape Shifters which is for the most part a short, eerie instrumental with strange synth/guitar. However, it doesn't really fit with rest of the album in terms of composition.

There's much more to Planetary Duality then just technical death metal though. Vocoder vocals are common, but the robotic voices don't add at all to the accessibilty of the music. If anything, it just makes it more unusual. There are a few instances of actual singing in the album, but it sounds rather out of place. Imagine James Labrie in Nile for example, and that should give the idea. Also one can find a few interesting piano lines.

All in all, it's a great album if you want to go crazy with your metal head friends. But even for the most extreme prog metal fans this will be difficult to digest, there's not much to get one's foot in the door. And forget the slightest notion of any classic prog fan trying to enjoy this. I feel a three out of five star rating is the best rating for it.

"Planetary Duality" is the second full-length studio album by US, California based death metal act The Faceless. The album was released through Sumerian Records in November 2008 (reissued by Lifeforce Records in February 2009). It is a self-produced release produced by guitarist/clean vocalist Micheal Keene. Drummer Lyle Cooper has been added to the lineup since the debut album "Akeldama" (2006) (which was mostly recorded using session drummers) but the rest of the lineup who recorded the debut album remains.

The music style featured on the album is technical death metal. It´s both pretty brutal and melodic at the same time. The guitar riffs are sharp and fast with lots of precise and technically complex drumming to go along. The vocals are mostly deep brutal growls (a few higher pitched screams too) but there are occasional clean/vocoder vocals featured too which is great for the variation of the album. One of my favorite features on the album are the many melodic guitar solos though. Very skillfully executed and an oasis of beauty in the midst of the brutal fast-paced and busy death metal. The vocoder parts provide the music with some futuristic/sci-fi sounding atmospheric moments which are another part of the music providing it with variation.

The album opens with the short and brutal "Prison Born" and quickly continues with the more progressive "The Ancient Covenant". That song is simply amazing technical death metal. Powerful and fast with some great guitar motifs. "Shape Shifters" is a short instrumental breather before "Coldy Calculated Design" begins and we´re once again treated with a fast-paced and technical death metal track. "Xeno Christ" is a bit different and heavier but still with faster parts. Great varied song that one. "Sons of Belial" is the song with most obvious use of clean vocals even though those vocals actually only occur twice in the song and only for a few seconds at a time. I didn´t care much for the clean vocals the first many times I listened to the album but I´ve come to appreciate them a little more with repeated listens of the album.

"Legion of the Serpent" is next and it´s the most melodic song on the album, featuring some interesting melodic breaks. It´s a great song and very important for the diversity of the album (the fast-paced neo-classical parts remind me of The Black Dahlia Murder). "Planetary Duality I : Hideous Revelation" is an intro to "Planetary Duality II : A Prophecies Fruition". The short intro track has some sci-fi samples which really creates the right atmopshere before the going into "Planetary Duality II : A Prophecies Fruition" which is another excellent technical death metal track.

The musicianship is outstanding on all posts. This is very complex and demanding music and The Faceless are a very tight playing unit. Add to that a clear, powerful, and detailed sound production and you have a high quality release on your hands. It´s like listening to the US hybrid version of Obscura and Necrophagist, although The Faceless don´t sound like a close. But there are a lot of similarities.

So upon conclusion The Faceless hit something special on "Planetary Duality". They hinted on greatness on "Akeldama", but they´ve developed their style a lot since the debut album, and by incorporating a lot of different influences and musical elements and songwriting ideas to their compositions (technical death metal, brutal death metal, progressive metal, even black metal), "Planetary Duality" is a both varied and intriguing technical death metal release from start to finish. They keep the listener on his/her toes throughout the album but still maintain a sort of accessibility that you don´t get often when listening to highly technical death metal releases. A 4 - 4.5 star (85%) rating is deserved.

(Originally posted on Metal Music Archives).

Wow! Talk about a mind-blowing album! The few samples I'd heard of The Faceless didn't impress me that much. So I figured I'd take the plunge and went and got their latest effort, Planetary Duality. And I was absolutely floored by it. If there was a blueprint for making technical death metal, I'd say these guys have written a pretty detailed one. This album clocks in at merely under thirty two minutes, but music of this kind doesn't need to take up much time or space. The Faceless may very well be a band to pay attention to in the years to come.

The Faceless plays a brand of technical death metal that reaches the complexity of giants in the genre such as Cynic and Atheist while adding a few elements of deathcore and metalcore. The vocals are very brutal as one would expect and the music is no less brutal. But there are melodic elements that appear in glimpses every now and then. Derek Rydquist's vocals are very much in the realm of metalcore and death growls, but guitarist Michael Keene adds some variety with a few clean vocals and the use of a vocoder. The music itself however is absolutely flooring. These guys have some serious chops, and hearing the brief bass riff and arpeggio guitars in the intro of The Ancient Covenant really helped seal the deal for me. Each song feels like it's composed of hundreds of riffs, and each one is almost as mind-blowing as the ones that come after it.

I'd love to give this release 5 stars, but it has yet to stand the test of time for me. So I'll give it 4 for now, but I am very likely to move this up to 5 eventually. Fans of technical or death metal owe it to themselves to check this out.

There are some albums out there that contain songs with a few great riffs that get repeated ad-nauseum to the point where the song is needlessly stretched out to tiresome lengths. This is not one of those albums. In fact, there's so many quick little riffs flying by that these songs feel like a blur at times. It can be fun at times to be bombarded with so much wankery and blasterbation, but it can also be irritating.

These guys are certainly more than capable at their instruments, and they sure in hell want you to know it. Even the bass player gets a quick little moment to shine at the beginning of one of the tunes. There's also some occasional diversions and additions to spice up the proceedings with a little bit of variety to avoid ennui from a constant non-stop barrage of riffs, sweeps and arpeggios. You have some keyboard moments, including a short instrumental that's quite atmospheric, some "clean" singing tossed about here and there along with a vocoder robot voice that once in a while pays a visit. There's also a couple of jazzy moments, maybe as a bone to throw at fans of Cynic and a few other extreme progressive metal bands. With the sci-fi theme, The Faceless here do seem to be seriously vying for the progressive stratosphere, at least within the confines of the extreme metal genre. My issue, though, is that nothing sticks at all, except for a few random moments here and there. It's like listening to guys practicing their scales together as fast as possible before launching into a bunch of riffs in which only a few have lasting power. The band does bounce around with genre expectations, including a small bit that sounds more like polished black metal than death metal, but as a whole I found myself enjoying parts of songs that work or sound cool as opposed to any tune for the full duration.

Apparently there are some 'deathcore' elements to this group's work, so take that for what it's worth, since it sounds like technical death metal with some embellishments and nothing more to me. It's certainly busy, and thankfully short at under 35 minutes with some monstrous skill involved. It's quite cleanly though unremarkably produced and thus with little atmosphere the songs rely on their craftsmanship and technicality. The Faceless have the technicality down pat for sure, so hopefully in the future they can balance their work by focusing more on creating songs that resonate instead of a bunch of ideas strung together. I will give it credit for being entertaining at times and decent enough if I'm in the mood for this sort of thing.