Authors: Primož Novak, Rok Klemše
Photos: Nina Grad
Venue: Trainstation, Kranj
Concert date: 16.02.2018
Ticket price: €8.00
Last-minute deals are often known as a marketing gimmick, but concerts are a different story. This time, American progressive death metallers The Faceless unexpectedly joined the already announced bill of Srd, Nature and Grob after their show in Switzerland got cancelled. So the lineup was in for a nice shake-up.
First onto the stage was a young black metal outfit from the Primorska region with a fine Slovenian name: Grob. Despite their youth, i.e. the year they formed, the band is anything but short on experience, since the group is made up of seasoned members of bands like Kreation Kodex, Hellcrawler and Human Putrefaction. Grob are slowly but steadily racking up live mileage. I caught them for the first time this time around, and I purposely hadn’t listened to their only release so far, the demo Graveyard of Eden. All I knew was that Grob play black metal, which the band made clear right away with their uniform look: the members were covered in black hoods, and the frontman didn’t say a single word to the crowd during the whole gig. In a good three quarters of an hour, Grob presented their take on black metal, stylistically aimed mainly at Swedish black metal like Marduk and Dark Funeral, and with well-placed melodic and short epic parts they occasionally reminded me of Polish giants Mgla. Grob provided a proper warm-up. For any deeper verdict we’ll have to listen to the debut Metanoia, which is in the works, but live there’s at least one thing that needs fixing, and it was glaringly distracting last Friday. Not only did the sound of the bass drums, or rather the triggers, sound like pounding on cardboard boxes, the drummer was also badly, badly struggling with stamina, clearly and audibly falling out of time during the blast beats and running out of steam in the faster parts.
After the black metal warm-up with Grob, Nature were up. This is a band that drew attention to themselves a few years back but later vanished. It seemed like they were no more, but all of a sudden Nature popped up again. In a heavily revamped lineup, as it turned out. In their set, Nature wanted to win people over with progressively tinged death metal reminiscent of those nineties bands that set important milestones in metal. Definitely appealing, but a few problems cropped up too. Things often felt chaotic, with no rhyme or reason. There was no sense that it all breathed as one. The ideas are definitely good, but at times it felt thrown together. Still, Nature show promise with interesting rhythms, interwoven vocals and confident guitars. The ideas are undoubtedly right, but they still need some sensible order.
The evening’s second, far more concrete and convincing black metal assault came courtesy of Srd, who in record time have practically become the standard-bearers of Slovenian black metal. It’s been a long while since a young band’s debut both won over the critics and captured the crowd without major trouble. Srd pulled that off with their messenger of death like it was nothing, and it’s great to see and hear that they’re neither resting on their laurels nor stagnating. In Kranj the guys greeted the crowd with a new track (if memory serves) and then, despite somewhat worse sound, once again proved the full power and majesty of the album Smrti sel. The band was commanded superbly by the reliable and convincing Goran, who spits out the songs with Slovenian lyrics especially like his life depends on it, and the instrumental side doesn’t lag behind in the slightest, delivering memorable riffs and crushing, varied drumming. Srd also played the excellent Srečo na vrvici, entirely true to its own self, and wrapped up their punchy, epic set too soon with the brilliant, monolithic ten-minute musical setting of Gregorčič’s Soči, which once again proved it belongs, without a doubt, among the finest achievements of Slovenian music, period.
The Faceless are no strangers. They first took a Slovenian stage in 2010 as part of the Bonecrusher tour and haven’t been back since. In the meantime the band has put out two albums, and the fourth, In Becoming a Ghost, came out last year. Above all, the band has caught every kind of criticism in recent years. First for a drastic change of style, second for constantly cancelling tours. For the latter there was no valid reason, and the band’s fans wanted to destroy them. Comments on social media pulled no punches, and it seemed the band couldn’t survive. Despite heavy pressure and countless lineup changes, bandleader Michael Keene kept the group going and took it around Europe in a stripped-down version, promising there would be no more cancelled shows. Everything in Europe went smoothly until the show in Switzerland was cancelled. The Faceless still wanted to play somewhere and, by a twist of circumstances, landed in Kranj, where they joined three local bands.
The Faceless’s set was relatively short but very sweet. The band kicked off with the Autotheism trilogy, three interconnected songs. It started slow and dreamy, then grew into something that could define extreme progressive death metal. The Faceless levelled up with the album Authotheism. They were no longer merely a technical death metal band but started leaning hard into prog. And here the band showed that the almost impossible can be combined: the technicality of Necrophagist and the progressiveness of Opeth. The melodic vocals took some flak, but it undoubtedly works in all its complexity. With Autotheism the stripped-down lineup of The Faceless, missing a bassist, definitely proved itself. Of course, that proper hit of technicality that came with the album Planetary Duality was still missing. There was no long wait, as the song Sons of Belial from that album followed straight away. Speed and virtuosity just wouldn’t run out. The Faceless sensibly calmed things down with Spiraling Void from the current album, which shows the band in a more progressive light, with more clean vocals from Michael Keene. A heavy blow followed with An Autopsy from the debut. That song is a great example of technical deathcore, which is above all chaotic and unpredictable. In other words, the complete opposite of deathcore clichés. The Faceless thus offered one more novelty: the biggest emphasis was actually on the album Planetary Duality, which isn’t the most logical thing when you’ve got a fresh album in your pocket. But that very album didn’t just make the band special, it signaled that modern technical death metal bands in the German mold are waking up in the USA.
After all the squabbles and social media criticism, The Faceless are clearly no write-off. The band is tight. Michael Keene stands out with the playing and singing, and vocalist Ken Sorceron, who otherwise performs in the black metal outfit Abigail Williams, is undoubtedly a gain. The screaming is stronger, which fits nicely with the band’s black metal elements, even more emphasized on the latest album, and the growling is there too, so all the band’s requirements are met. Keene was excellently backed throughout by rhythm guitarist Justin McKinney (The Zenith Passage), while the fast and precise drums were handled by young Bryce Butler, who undoubtedly shone and lived up to high expectations. Now the hope is mainly that Keene has managed to stabilize the lineup to some extent, one where a bassist who’d help complete the sound would truly come in handy.
If you draw a line under this pleasant and brutal gig, for a measly eight euros The Faceless, Srd, Nature and Grob made sure plenty of souls who swear by more extreme metal got their fix at Kranj’s Trainstation club on Friday night. A last-minute deal that definitely paid off.
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