When we last heard from The Faceless, I was pleasantly surprised by their debut effort Akeldama. Seeing the bands they were compared to and seeing Sumerian Records’ roster made me think that the band was going to suck ass. Akeldama surprised me by ripping out a slab of brutal death metal mixed with technicality, melody, and progressive leanings that was genuinely entertaining and accessible, able to appeal to a wide audience of death metal fans, and actually avoided a lot of the problems plaguing modern death metal bands coming out of the American scene today. Of course, with The Faceless having now effectively established themselves with intensively touring (many legs including really shitty deathcore acts), the question now is whether or not The Faceless can repeat the same quality of record on Planetary Duality.

They didn’t.

Planetary Duality is actually their best record period. The familiar melodic, technical riffing is still here, waxing light Necrophagist elements throughout the entire record, and there’s still the big progressive influence and nods to Cynic here and there. However, speaking of the prog and Cynic elements, they’ve far beyond mastered them on Planetary Duality. To begin, they make use of that pesky robo voice vocoder… and it doesn’t suck. How is that possible? Subtlety, boys and girls. Subtlety. The robo voice never takes lead, always goes for support and atmosphere, and is used so little it’s practically spartan. Additionally there are the keyboards: on Akeldama they worked but often went far beyond the borders of their waters into the seas of cheese; on Planetary Duality, they’re correctly implemented and far from cheesy.

And then there is the new element of an occasional clean vocal used here and there. Do not fret, death metal children, for these are not ‘core elements. No, these vocals exist outside choruses and are only used in a couple of songs. Their structure is more in the vein of progressive death metal acts like middle-era Edge of Sanity, In Vain, etc. And even if you don’t like them, they’re barely even present enough to bother you.

The Faceless have crafted a superior followup to their debut in the form of Planetary Duality. They’ve improved on all counts, and by the time you hit the awesome 2-part epic eponymous closer, you’re going to be salivating for more melodic, technical goodness. Yet again, for a second time, The Faceless have averted my fears.

Review byNecro-tron