I have accumulated many personal reviews while listening to albums. My reviewing style is non-conventional and was only intended for myself. Sometimes I will only use one sentence to describe an album if I feel that is all that's required. Other times I will review an album while I'm still listening to it, leading to a song-by-song review of the album (bringing the size of the review to nearly dissertation-level). There are times when I will even come back to a review to add information that I didn't know when originally writing the review. The point is that I won't edit my reviews to make them more readable or conventional. My reviews are always a direct result of what I was feeling when I wrote them and I want to let that feeling come through.



Showing posts with label The Faceless. Show all posts
Showing posts with label The Faceless. Show all posts

Friday, March 4, 2011

The Faceless - Planetary Duality [2008]

Ok, half-way through the second track and I can already tell that the songwriting has improved quite a bit. Some riffs aren't all that powerful, but at least they still feel like they serve a purpose. Contrary to the mainstream opinion, I think that the use of robotic vocoder is nifty and interesting. "Shape Shifters" flexes the deeper songwriting muscles responsible for creativity in a song before bashing my face in with "Coldly Calculated Design". This feels like a much more energetic and brutal album than the first one. It's actually quite good, this album. More catchy songwriting combined with some creativity, great consistency throughout the album, extremely precise technicality, and ESPECIALLY the near-exclusion of that shit-fest known as Melodic Thrash Metal make this album the first one from this band that I will listen to regularly. Even so, it's not exactly ground-breaking or pushing the limits of Metal to some amazing new area, but it is very well-done and with a style that is mostly their own.

Rating: 8

http://www.myspace.com/thefaceless

All ratings are out of 10. Rating may not be a whole number.
Posted by at No comments:
Labels: , ,

The Faceless - Akeldama [2006]

It's pretty straight-forward Technical Death Metal. Unfortunately, some of it feels a bit cliché. However, there are bouts of creativity and interesting keys thrown in the mix to set the music apart from the rest. The technicality is quite impressive. Some of the transitions could use working on to make them more smooth and increase the song's flow. I'm certainly not a fan of the Melodic Thrash sections littered about the album like plastic bags in a state park. One other thing I don't like is that I can clearly hear all of the hard-cuts performed by the recording engineer. Overall, it's a competent first album that has some creativity mixed into a fairly stock but effective style with bouts of catchiness. The reality is that I will probably only come back to this album for one or two songs.

Rating: 6.5

http://www.myspace.com/thefaceless

All ratings are out of 10. Rating may not be a whole number.
Posted by at No comments:
Labels: , ,
Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)