Review Summary: Will this album change your opinion of technical death metal? No. Will it provide you with some fast, fun metal? Oh, hell yes.
Some bands feel the need to constantly advance their music. Atheist, for example, needed to add elements of jazz to their death metal sound in order to stay content with themselves. Bands such as Death and Edge of Sanity experimented with injecting death metal with progressive touches and melody. On the other hand, some bands decided to take a fun, entertaining formula and stick with it. Consequentially, their music was usually not a revelation or a giant leap forward for the genre, but rather a collection of enjoyable songs. The Faceless, one of the more interesting contemporary technical death metal bands, certainly falls into the latter category, as evidenced by their most recent album,
Planetary Duality. While this nascent band's music is not yet fully matured, it is still interesting and it definitely displays a band with much potential to become one of the future titans of technical death metal.
When listening to
Planetary Duality, the first noticeable aspect of the music is the technicality. From the tremolo-picked intro to album opener
Prison Born and the majestic sweeps in
Ancient Covenant, to the incredibly fast riffs of closer
Planetary Duality II-A Prophecies Fruition, the band insists on pushing their impressive technical abilities to the very limits and almost never taking breaks. Every instrument is played flawlessly and with blistering speed, with the exception of the vocals. The singing is not poorly done in the least, and Michael Rydquist and Michael Keene, the vocalists, show great versatility as they alternate from growling to shrieking, and sometimes to computer-altered and even clean singing. However, the vocals are sadly generic, and are far less entertaining than the other instruments, and therefore are an evident downside.
However, the album's main strengths and weaknesses are displayed through the songwriting. Much of the material, such as
XenoChrist contains good songwriting, and is absolutely enthralling. In addition, the
Planetary Duality duo that ends the album ranks among the best technical death metal songs of the past decade. Also, The Faceless try to add variety to the album by splicing in the occasional clean solo, distorted vocal, or spacey piano, and these unconventional moments are the most memorable segments of the album. However, the songwriting is very inconsistent. Many of the riffs resort to rapidly strumming the same note over and over again rhythmically, leading to many predictable, unoriginal, and bland segments. By the end of the album, many of the ideas seem to be reused once or twice, and a lot of the songs blend together, despite the band's effort to add variety. The album's brevity and the even distribution of interesting songs just barely save
Planetary Duality from becoming boring.
The biggest problem with
Planetary Duality is that most of the ideas presented are not original, and have been done much better by bands such as Necrophagist and Death. If the band increased the frequency of original ideas and made the songwriting more consistent, then they would become a force to be reckoned with. As it stands, however,
Planetary Duality is album that is escapes mediocrity only due to the inclusion of some interesting material and exemplary performances from the musicians.
