PLANETARY DUALITY

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.