Faust Again
The Trial
6.1
Man, it’s been a while since I heard these Polish Darkest Hour worshippers, as the last release I heard was their 2003 debut, Seizing Our Souls. I never heard 2005's Hope Against Hope, but it looks like little has changed as Faust Again still look to be Darkest Hour fans as well as the German metalcore scene fans (Fear My Thoughts, Heaven Shall Burn, Maroon, Neaera, etc) with their hardcore crossed take on melodic death metal.
Comprised of 13 tracks, only 9 of which are actual songs, (the rest are interludes) The Trial is a concept album and shows a more ambitious side to Faust Again with longer songs, some clean vocals and more of an emphasis on melodies and solos and more complex songs structures.
The thing is, for all of its slightly less tense galloping and more rangy artistic take on metalcore, I’ll be damned if I can recall a single note or moment after the album is done. The interludes rarely add much to the overall sense of the album and the songs themselves, while competent, just don’t leave any indelible imprint. I literally let the album repeat- 6-7 times one day, and each time I was never really sucked in or even aware when the album started or ended - it was just there as background music. Which is a bit of a shame as you can tell Faust Again put a lot of effort into this release, and for a Polish band to be this competent takes some skill and conviction, even if it's in a genre where they are bound to get steamrolled by their U.S. counterparts in the genre.
However, for the U.S. fanboys, Faust Again is a nice, relatively obscure addition to the genre - they have all the elements including clean vocals here and there, but the back bone is pseudo melodic death metal with some breakdowns. And all the while, you get a sense that their music is more honest than a lot of the U.S. cookie cutter acts simply trying to get a CD into Hot Topic (is there even a Hot Topic in Poland?). Tracks like “Call for Life,” “One Minute Dream,” “Voice Inside” and 7 minute closer “The End” have a certain somber, grey (Eastern European?) emotionality amid the metalcore clichés and while I personally thought the album was fairly uneventful (I’m guessing to the other fantastic metal I’ve been listening to lately), fans of metalcore/melodic death metal could do worse.
