Review Summary: Blistering waves of crushing roars and drumming paired with soothing harmony, seemingly machine.
Fallujah is perhaps one of the only bands to meld soothing harmonics and sweet soothing cleans among a heavy, over the top death metal record. It make for an incredibly beautiful balance both an assault and a lullaby, ranging from "Carved From Stone" to "Alone With You". This guitars weave and wind incredibly intricate riffs and the drumming constantly pulls through being beyond rapid fire and blasting. However it does tend to become "loud for the sake of being loud", and the drum work and guitars sound over produced and synthetic. Its a double edged sword, really- sacrificing a wholly organic sound for power, which upon the first listen works in their favor, even if its a bit tiring over time.
In a way you almost expect this from the record, however. Synths pop in and out of the album entirely for mood breaks and to dampen down the loudness as to not make it sound overboard. This interplay vastly increases the album quality, because even when it sounds like the album was created by a machine, it sounds like perhaps that was the intention-an album manufactured to sound as synthetic and inhuman as possible. Take that as you may, I think it works perfectly, especially when you see they can perform this machine like sound live.
However, perhaps the most perfect surprise, is that buried beneath the vast layers of rapid fire drum kicks and technically proficient guitar passages and the ambient interludes, their are riffs that loop in your head like true musical genius. Riffs found like that towards the end of "Sapphire" or in "The Night Reveals/The Flesh Prevails." They are so well crafted and its difficult to pinpoint really why, but it adds something so much death metal is lacking- catchy hooks.
Their is only one piece of this album not extremely appealing, which would be the vocals. Its mildly cookie cutter, and the range is just to minimal. The vocalist does make great use of his very minimal range, as the growls are bellowing with power and often serve to give the crunch that makes the climaxes of 'The Flesh Prevails" so grande- the vocals, albeit quite low and a bit vanilla, are soaring with absolute power.
So in spite of the album being a bit mechanical, the interplay between instruments is amazing. The album is incredibly technical but the ambient synth serves for amazing breaks, and melds harmony and heaviness in a perfect weave.
