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Faithful Darkness - Archgod review



Reviewer:
6.0

10 users:
7.3
Band: Faithful Darkness
Album: Archgod
Release date: December 2014


01. Lies Tells The Truth
02. Snake & Muse
03. The Witness
04. An Ocean Of Time
05. Paradise
06. Where Stars Burn?
07. Banished
08. The End Of It All
09. Corrupted
10. Shaping A Horizon
11. Archgod
12. One And The World
13. A Final Storm

It's with a restrictive rigidity that Faithful Darkness deliver in Archgod. For a band that would seize upon the frenetic kinetics of thrash in order to differentiate their position within melodic death metal, fixed tempos and a generic construct prove pervasive and limiting.

At its most commendable the record offers a highly melodic variant of thrash metal to distinguish its general melodic death metal framework. Much of the band's creative energies are exhausted on providing a thrash emphasis, while basing their song writing in a standardised approach to the Gothenburg style characterised by a clean and harsher vocal combination and keyboard layering.

Tracks such as "Banished" more noticeably breach the generic mould with particular attention given to thrash over melody. It's at these moments that the band sound at their most energised, striking commendable points of difference within what is generally an unremarkable record defined by a persistent and competent rhythm section that rarely departs from its set course significantly in terms of pace and presentation. Though thrashing leads are found throughout Archgod, it's when they become the focus that the song writing can be noted as possessing particularly effective hooks, where the melodies and vocal lines generally fail to do so. The vocals are responsible for the metalcore inclinations of the record, both the harsh and clean representing their sound in an identifiably modern approach to the genre.

The elements infrequently run parallel, and only throughout examples such as "Shaping a Horizon" do the band best establish a working dynamic between their unison of thrash and melodic death. Faithful Darkness write and perform their best material in the thrash directed segments of Archgod, rather than establishing an effective combination of these two elements overall.

In all likelihood if Faithful Darkness were to structure their sound with a basis in thrash, rather than the limiting generic melody of a modernised Gothenburg template, the results would be much more convincing given what is hinted at in the sporadic effectiveness of this latest record.


Rating breakdown
Performance: 7
Songwriting: 6
Originality: 5
Production: 8





Written on 17.12.2014 by R'Vannith enjoys music, he's hoping you do too.


Comments

Comments: 1   Visited by: 52 users
18.12.2014 - 01:31
Rating: 6
R'Vannith
ghedengi
Written by deadone on 18.12.2014 at 01:24

Sounds extremely uninspiring.


Very much so, unfortunately. :/ There's some promising moments in here, they're just few and far between.
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