Australia is well known for its multifaceted ability to take human lives. There are trapdoor spiders ready to pierce venom-dripping fangs into the weak flesh of gardening hands when least expected. Incredibly pissed-off tiger snakes seemingly exist with the sole purpose of aggressively attacking anything that may incidentally give them the side eye. A nearly invisible box jellyfish can make a welcoming calm sea a paralytic death trap. Even the outwardly cute animals will royally fuck you up. A Kangaroo’s main method of fighting is whipping its legs forward with lightning speed to disembowel or remove genitals with a large claw. The landscape even hates people! Almost the entirety of the country’s population resides on the coasts because the environment of the interior is so damn hostile.
Not a ton has changed from Speciation to At The Foothills of Deliration, and that’s perfectly fine. Five of its six tracks remain lengthy doses of ever-transforming brutality that come at the listener with a limitless barrage of weapons. No two riffs are the same and even the most potent of their strikes shift with repeated blows.
“Equipoise Recast” tears out a riff machine where each version of it changes slightly as it builds toward a lead as rare and precious as Oz gold. A few minutes later, the song slows into rolling licks with a touch of atmosphere that brings in that little taste of Nile. The end of “From The Bastion To The Pit” sees the song deteriorate into an unruly flurry of notes, which isn’t to be outdone by the most rhythmically wild stretch of patterns on “Dehiscent.” That song is also a good example of why bassist and vocalist Alex McFarlane’s work on the four-string is so important to these songs. McFarlane perfectly times when to lock in, when to provide a sliding note to bolster a rhythm, or when to groove/pop out of the mix to provide an extra punch. The lightning of Füj’s dive bombs, scribbling notes and fiery riffs against McFarlane’s thundering basswork make for a delightful storm worth sitting on the porch to experience rolling through. That’s not to say Max Kohane’s drumming should be overlooked. If you’ve heard anything from Faceless Burial before, you know his complex patterns, and cymbal work, in particular, are the most lethal part of this trio.
This time, the production leaves At The Foothills of Deliration with a drier, sun-scorched sound. The album sounds like it sat in the Outback for three days with no water and you can just imagine the core of its being turned into dusty sand. McFarlane’s dry bellow matches that sound well. In addition to the production, the mix is a great boon to the band’s style. Pete deBoer does a great job having each instrument shift in the ear at key times to help add to the chaos of the music without letting it become disjointed. A riff will start skittering across your head just to fly back over to the original ear and explode across your whole dome into a flourish of not-quite-but-almost lead notes. The bass will pop and float across the mix while the drums sit on either side, leaving you missing half the song if you only have one earbud in. The listener is forced to hear the whole thing and the notes coming at you from different spots in the mix really help the songs feel more dynamic.
A somewhat flash-in-the-pan new element of the songwriting appears in the form of the pseudo title instrumental track “Haruspex at the Foothills of Deliration.” For the first time, McFarlane adds synthesizers to his repertoire, which feature prominently here with a greater sense of atmosphere and female vocals as well. At roughly three minutes in length, it is far and away the shortest track but also presents the most interesting development from their previous full length. That sense of atmosphere and use of more instrumental voices opens the door to an even more dynamic future. Here’s to hoping they opt to delve into these elements more deeply and wrap them into more songs like a rock python coyly blending into a cliff face akin to those brief passages late in “Equipoise Recast” mentioned earlier.
While the movement forward is minimal, something tells me Faceless Burial is only just getting started. However, what they’re dishing out now is still well worth sampling for any tech death fan looking for a fresh type of poisonous animal to see up close.
