Review: The Faceless - Autotheism (2012)

The Faceless is known for its on-going evolution through their short career. In their first album we find a young band with a promising debut that was kinda hard to classify due to technicalities, and those infamous Deathcore influences. However, it was a good album.

In Planetary Duality we could see better technical aspects, and a stronger and more solid way of composition. Being their second work, they became very noticeable in the underground community, whether we liked it or not.

But we weren't expecting this, nobody imagined “Autotheism” sounding like this.  Let's get started with the review.

The first song has the name of the album, and it's divided in three movements. In “Create” it's obvious that the song is warming up, hitting its boiling point, in an abysmal atmosphere where the clean voice progressively combines with growls in a rather gentle way, inviting the listener to "let go". Then starts Emancipate, where it takes its course and the guttural voices make themselves protagonists. The songwriting is impressive, details and phrasings consume the atmosphere, all of this with a brutal tone that is contained, just where it's needed, in a really good melodic "movement", with its heavier parts and a mostly calmed atmosphere, which will, for most of the part, stay firm in the record. And with its final part, Deconsecrate, ends THE SONG of the album (yeah, that's right), and the main guideline, because with this little oeuvre we know this guys are serious, and they have much more to give. On my opinion, this song shoulda been saved for the closure of the album, because It leaves you wanting more and more. And that will be an inconvenience, unfortunately.

In Acelerated Decrepitation, the sound takes a more technical path, with a round song, lots of tempo changes, alternating gutturals and clean voices with a really good taste. Until now, the record is amazingly good, melodic and balanced.

And The Eidolon Reality begins with lots of energy, getting similar to a passage of  Planetary Duality, until the chorus, where a (poppy?) attack appears. The song then gets into a weird section, with a certain Djent influence, and taking a hook that remains until the end of the song. And here is where I start to wonder where is the ambient and atmosphere that the álbum had on the beginning. 

And Ten Billion Years makes the autotheist star shine again, with an introduction that leads to a slow, complicated and heavy song, which makes you feel the prior song was a stumble. This is another interesting song, with an orchestration that, even being on the background, enhances the whole song a lot.

Well, Hail Science, with an introduction that could have easily been adapted to the next song, opens the gate to the most direct song of the album, Hymn Of Sanity, that in a minute with some samples crushes and shakes your world because of its strength and wildness.

And here comes the finale. In "In Solitude", we found a pretty much melodic band that wants to end the record with the most memorable way possible, with help from a really interesting guitar phrasing. But (again) we get to a chorus that, in the look for that hook, loses its course, in an unnecessary intent to be "radio-friendly", something that removes tact, that was present in the clean voices at the beginning of the album.

In conclusion, The Faceless looks for new sounds. We just hope that they get to balance their sound, because there's the risk that they get distorted all the way through.

A work that couldn't keep going the way it began. We hope that the evolution continues and it doesn't end in false promises.

Score: 80/100