Originally written by Brady Humbert.
This totally caught me by surprise. I was expecting a band called, Facebreaker, to be some kind of blend of bad Hatebreed with some horribly sung clean vocals and hackneyed Pantera breakdowns. I also investigated the band’s listing on Encyclopedia Metallum and the obligatory metal tough guy photo would’ve been a complete giveaway. Certainly not the case here.
Instead, Facebreaker is in the simplest sense a cross between Dismember and the last three Grave albums with some extremely gnarly death vocals. Lots of strange effects and tones come from vocalist Roberth Karlsson who sounds like a cross between Jorgen Sandstrom from Grave and Corpsegrinder. The guitars are downtuned, fuzzy, and very very newer Grave. The tempos are very urgent and speedy with lots of boom/tap four on the floor beats mixed with some excellent grooves, a la Dismember. So imagine if Ola from Grave joined Fred Astby from Dismember and decided to play something very appropriate to what’s on their resumes.
“Night of the Burning Dead” is a nice grooving number with plenty of Grave-isms. “Burner” is a plodding death metal steak dinner. Roberth hits a homerun here, but this song would’ve been ULTIMATE with some guest vocals from Jorgen Sandstrom. “The Awakening” has a really brutal thrash tempo and more of the demonic vocal effect that really helps to not make this album stagnant. Check out the guitar solo breakdown around the 1:40 mark, there’s some excellent guttural vox. Album opener, “Slowly Rotting” puts ass to face and it really doesn’t let up, at any point. The songs are all of the same fiber, old school death metal with modern production. The songs are all short (two to three minutes) and the band manages to make the songs differentiate so there’s not much in the way of riff-recycling or repetition.
Early period death metal is my favorite style of music, out of everything I listen to. This is why I gave the songwriting a 6. To hear bands still finding a way to make the genre sound fresh is really encouraging. Especially in the day and age of “we need to blast in every part of the song while also playing every note at the same while our vocalist says ‘bree bree'”. Facebreaker, proves here, that the real power of this genre is unchanged. If you tune your guitar to G, play simple thrash tempos, and get a solid vocalist, you don’t need to know what a mixolydian mode is or how to play it 18 times in 2 measures. This is simple, to the point death metal and I would recommend it to anyone who likes their death Swedish, fuzzy, and 15 to 20 years old.
