Faceshift - All Crumbles Down

Faceshift

All Crumbles Down

by Andrew Sifari at 01 April 2015, 4:33 PM

FACESHIFT is a Metal band from Stockholm, Sweden. Starting in 2005, the band’s debut effort showed a group in search of a musical direction, which they seem to have found with resounding success on 2015’s “All Comes Down.”

The members of the band have an interesting combination of backgrounds, including Melodic Death Metal and Prog. They make it all work by taking the best musical elements of their influences and applying one, overarching theme to the album: pure, visceral heaviness. The main riffs to opening track “Betrayed” have an undeniably gritty feel, and the subtle guitar wails between verses give it a sense of strangeness and foreboding before transitioning seamlessly into the song’s passionate chorus. FACESHIFT amp things up on the next track, the wonderfully honest and thundering “The Lie.” Timo Hovinen belts out his thinking man’s poetry with tremendous power and presence, not unlike Matt Barlow’s earlier material with ICED EARTH, but as much of an X-factor as he is, “All Comes Down” really is a team effort. The infectious, bluesy leads add a bit of flair, as well as humanity to some of the less melody-charged processions, while Stefan Norgren’s earth-shaking drums take the album’s already considerable heaviness to another level.

Another great aspect of “All Comes Down” is the range of musical moods and tones covered. Lyrically, the album has a very serious attitude, but instrumentally, the listener gets a great range of emotion in the melodies and paces used. “Of Dignity and Shame,” for example, is every bit as intense and critical as you would expect, and the opening riffs don’t disappoint at first, but the guitars in the song’s chorus have a warm and uplifting quality that effectively counterbalances it. Elsewhere, songs like “A New Beginning” and “Awoken” soar like the Power Metal of old but with the consciousness of today’s Modern Metal bands. The real show-stealer comes at the very end, with the deeply personal-sounding “When All Crumbles Down” a song as emotionally heavy as it is soft musically, tearing at the heartstrings for the album’s final five minutes before fading away like a dying wind.

It’s a stark contrast to the album’s beginning that satisfies nonetheless. “All Comes Down” an engrossing effort beginning to end, with eleven tracks of heavy, driving, vital-sounding Metal that should please any fans of heavy Rock and Metal music.