Originally written by Chris Redar
2014 has already brought us some stunning tech-death releases. From Inanimate Existence’s latest to… okay, 2014 is like every other year as far as tech-death goes. It’s a tough genre to convincingly perform with any sort of conviction, especially with the ongoing LOUDNESS WARS ™. Do San Francisco’s Fallujah (that’s an unfortunate name, by the way) have what it takes to not bore the shit out of us with endless noodling and straight-off-the-american-cheese-line processed everything?
The answer isn’t as cut-and-dry as a simple “yes” or “no,” but yes and no. The first half of The Flesh Prevails is engaging to the point of bordering on phenomenal. This being Teath™ and all, it goes without saying that these lads can play the shit out of their instruments (even though it was just said). The opening one-two of “Starlit Path” and “Carved From Stone” perform the magnificent stunt-driving act of weaving in and out of technical and brutal, though the latter does so much more confidently than the former. It’s so goddamn good, man… Were this album that song and that song alone, repeated nine times, it would be worth full price. We’ve still got some months to go, but this one’s going to be tough to top for record o’ the year.
Unfortunately, in a matter of a couple tracks, The Flesh Prevails hits a wall, and hits it hard. “Alone With You,” which can only be described as part of a soundtrack to a mid-90’s softcore porno, destroys all ebb and flow — and, accordingly, any momentum — that The Flesh Prevails had built at this point. And, even more unfortunately, the album peters out even further with three strange combinations of Satriani-style jam sessions meeting what a Japanese video game developer thinks American audiences like to hear during final boss battles. It’s fucking odd, man. (Even more so than that poorly structured and impossible to understand sentence about how it sounds.) Why would a band choose to end an album with nearly twenty minutes of what is essentially overindulgent practicing? Consider my mind boggled.
And now it’s time for what you’ve all been waiting for: Chris Redar’s Production Complaints Travelling Sideshow™. It sucks in a very specific way on this one; it’s like every individual track is a crayon that was laid out in the sun, side by side, in the hopes that they would all melt together into a beautiful Teath™ rainbow. Instead, it just sounds like one big brown lump of wax. And it’s clear that Andrew Baird can play the shit out of the drums, so it was probably unnecessary to set the snare trigger to AA-12. Locusta showed us all earlier this year that this style isn’t mandatory to good technical material. Meanwhile, we have Fallujah here, sounding like parts of this were done completely on keyboards.
Bottom line: This is slightly more than half of a great album, and it would have been an easy EOY selection as an EP. As a full-length, however, it’s exactly however many minutes the last four songs are too long. So, a bit of advice, future band-starters: Think about EPs. The all-killer, no-filler route should always be the preferred path, lest ye get lost in the woods forever.
