Nick Judkins
This is my favourite album of the year and one of the best death metal album in years. Technical and clever without being indulgent and pretentious. Please reprint the logo shirts!
Neil Grace
Wow! One of my absolute favourite modern death metal bands for sure and this release cements that further. Such a heavy and uncompromising sound for a three piece. Relentless and face melting and very well thought out. The production is superb.
bcb723
Is it just me or does this record sound amazing? Just a fantastic production which serves to highlight the killer riffs and complex songs of "Speciation." This is the new old-school.
Favorite track: Speciation.
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 and follow-up Multiversal Abattoir MLP 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, FACELESS BURIAL play their strongest hand yet with the full-length Speciation. Altogether sharper and more finessed than all previous, Speciation spreads unimaginable DEATH METAL MIGHT with malignant ease.
FACELESS BURIAL exude a charisma that’s totally their own, which largely comes down to the songwriting itself. Where the preceding records maintained a murky ‘n’ malodorous aspect, that was predominantly in the sound itself; here on Speciation, it’s been parlayed into the tense ‘n’ treacherous textures they explore. 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 coloured by narrative lead work. Which is to say nothing of the album’s powerful production, which is rendered in authentically analogue tones and further underlines the band’s reverent devotion to death metal classicism.
Adorned with form-meeting-content cover artwork, Speciation is bound to be the year’s most forward-thinking/backwards-looking death metal album.
credits
released August 7, 2020
Vinyl: Me Saco Un Ojo Records
CD: Dark Descent Records
Cassette: Me Saco Un Ojo Records & Dark Descent Records
Record January 2020 by Finn Keane at Headgap Recording studios, Melbourne Australia.
Mixed and Mastered at World Famous Studios, Colorado.
never been a big death metal fan but this is actually super accessible for the genre, has fun concepts, and personally i'm always a fan of albums with short tracklists and huge runtimes (for individual songs) Great time, good jumping on point for newbies too. alienasu
An outstanding Extreme doom death album, in the best tradition. The funerary atmosphere reminds of Evoken ('Centuries of ooze" bears striking similarities, for my delight). It is overall sharp, dark, hypnotic and unrelenting. One of those rare convincing new bands that hold proud the legacy of the biggest names. Bertrand Marchal