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The Faceless - Planetary Duality CD (album) cover

PLANETARY DUALITY

The Faceless

 

Tech/Extreme Prog Metal

3.77 | 31 ratings

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topofsm
3 stars 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.

topofsm | 3/5 |

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