12/18/2023 0 Comments The faceless planetary dualityThis album’s influence can’t be overstated it’s a sound that bands have been chasing as frantically as Epitaph’s, if not more so, but in the pursuit of that sound, I believe other bands have surpassed it. However, what was revolutionary in 2008 has become mundane, perhaps even tired, in 2018. The album’s title track, besides carrying some of the most potent prog grooves ever penned, makes brilliant use of the infamous Area 51 caller on Art Bell’s “Coast to Coast” program to tie into the story: It’s total lunacy that there are people who believe this sort of thing, but it makes for excellent death metal subject matter. Loosely based on conspiracy nutjob David Icke’s Children of the Matrix, the album details the mankind’s manipulation at the hands of an extradimensional alien race that ultimately plane shift their planet into our reality. The final element of the experience is the album’s concept. That’s not to say that this was the first clean-sounding death metal album ever, but compare it to just about any clean modern tech death album’s production it’s almost certain to bear a lot of similarity. I strongly suspect that Planetary Duality had a hand in Pär Olofsson’s explosion in popularity, its operating-table-clean style and vivid purples reflected by Michael Keene’s slick engineering job. Of course, the music itself is only part of the package. Seminal classic “XenoChrist” is the embodiment of of this new sound, exemplifying everything The Faceless was about at this point in time. Heavy use of vocoder is pulled straight from Cynic’s playbook, but here, they’re twisted and alien, a far cry from the soothing atmospheric effect the former produced. This took Necrophagist’s clean shredding and dragged it through a landscape of shifting time signatures replete with sinister keys, punchy grooves, and nasty death metal riffing. The Faceless had previously explored a rough-cut unification of these ideas on 2006’s Akeldama, but that was built on a foundation primarily consisting of a solution of deathcore and melodeath Planetary Duality was the album that truly changed the game. It was wild and diverse, with many of what we consider familiar traits for the genre’s yet to be defined. Necrophagist were still riding the Epitaph wave at the forefront of the noodly tech death field, prog giants Cynic were primed to release Traced In Air, Decapitated were moving away from their wilder roots towards their modern groove-oriented sound, and Spawn of Possession and Decrepit Birth exemplified the more archetypal “death metal” side of things. To that end, you’re getting a brief history lesson of dubious accuracy from someone who didn’t listen to any metal at the time:įrom a high-level standpoint, the tech death landscape of 2008 wasn’t too different from what we have today, though each “school” of tech death felt a little more rigidly defined (and Fallujah had yet to bring about the advent of post-tech, for lack of a better term). Let’s see if we can break down what exactly led to this album’s enduring legacy. This coming Sunday marks the 10th anniversary of Planetary Duality, one of the most influential albums on the modern tech death scene. Forget the revolving door lineup, forget about the drug abuse, and just focus on the music. You were promised more Tech Death Titans, and now we deliver on that promise.īefore we get this started, I’d like you to set aside everything that’s been swirling around The Faceless the last year or so.
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