Faceless Burial

Faceless Burial

At The Foothills Of Deliration

Dark Descent

Since 2014, Australian death metal trio Faceless Burial have provided Dark Descent with two scorching albums, an EP and a demo. Well it is now time to see if this winning streak of brutality continues! Never a band to falter, At The Foothills Of Deliration begins on blast-beats and firestorms of malevolent riffing, with more deliciously warped bass lines that provide an intricate tapestry of sound, along with squealing leads and gargantuan vocals. The punchiness and utterly monolithic production instantly captivates the mind while the musicianship bends into inhuman shapes from the onset, taking one into cosmic realms and sepulchral crypts in sweeps of dynamic brilliance. The technical edge is still very much present, thus fans of insane musicianship can rest easy, faces will melt. That said, this is no obnoxious show of skill without substance as the previous material can attest to. No, Faceless Burial are masterful songwriters as well, who can string together beautiful atmospherics and odious grooves into an unimaginably bold and vibrant yet still filthily heavy cut of death metal. Clocking in at just under forty minutes with six diverse tracks woven into a singularity, this new record lives up to the name Faceless Burial with exquisitely interesting and gripping music that shall hold even the dullest attention span—thanks to the malignant heaviness and contorting progressions that are offered in abundance, without feeling too haphazard (though definitely chaotic). As soon as anything can become comfortable, an angular change shifts into play with barbaric aggression conveying extremely...

Faceless Burial

Speciation

Dark Descent

For the past five years, Australia’s Faceless Burial have been flying the flag of classicist ’90s death metal, first across a demo in 2015 and then the subsequent (and acclaimed) Grotesque Miscreation debut album in 2017, along with the follow-up Multiversal Abattoir 12-inch a year later. Those latter two recordings, in particular, portrayed the potency of this power-trio, displaying an unremittingly dark and dexterous sound which draws in a variety of death metal traditions.  Going from strength to strength, the band play their strongest hand yet with the full-length Speciation. Altogether sharper and more finessed than all previous, this release spreads unimaginable death metal might with malignant ease.  This band exudes a charm that’s all their own, which largely comes down to the songwriting itself. Preceding records maintained a murky ’n’ malodorous aspect, predominantly in the sound; here it’s been parlayed into tense ’n’ treacherous textures. Otherwise, no great changes have been made, nor should there be: forever twisting and never stagnating, each of these six songs reveals new corridors through which to spelunk, and efficiently so across the album’s deceptively epic 36-minute runtime.  Thankfully, once again, Faceless Burial evade the riff-salad tendencies of so much tech-oriented death metal; their sound isn’t so much a restless blast through scattershot ideas as it is an endlessly malforming entity making rude shapes, and now one colored by narrative lead work. Which is to say nothing of the album’s powerful production, rendered in authentically analogue tones, further underlining the band’s...