Amongst the chaos. Amongst the scene-kid metal bands. Amidst metal's darkest hour (pun intended) comes a shimmering ray of hope for all that enjoy fast-paced, heavy, melodic, and technical death metal. That ray of hope is The Faceless, an all-American band that simply wants to rock out and melt faces off (another pun intended) with their unique and progressive blend of Cynic-like vocals (on "The Ancient Covenant"), guitar mastery (pretty much every track), genre hopping, (most Akeldama stuff and also on "XenoChrist") and of course, good songwriting. It comes as a suprise that this band can pull it off with a pretty short album, but they do. Quality, my friends, speaks more than quantity. I'll admit I was skeptical when I first saw the tracks on my iTunes. Wow, like 3 tracks are under/slightly over a minute long. Can I hear FILLER? No, because the first song tricks you into thinking it is a shitty intro that most death metal/hardcore bands have nowadays. It is a full-on aggressive song, that reminds you of the days when bands like Slayer and Dark Angel only needed one or two minutes to blow your mind. Another one, "Shape Shifters" is like an interlude, minus the interlude part. It is kind of like a synth-guitar duet with main man Michael Keene on guitar showing he can work a clean guitar tone just as well as a distorted one. Aside from producing the album, he also is a damn good guitarist. This short 40 seconds of calmness do not prepare you for the jump into "A Coldly Calculated Design" which it does not transition into, just dives right in. Every track is a reminder and an improvement on Akeldama at the same time. The keyboards are more prominent (and have more complex parts) and unlike the last album, there is one drummer on all of the recordings! Once again the Cynic vocoder thing returned, but has a smaller part. Instead of lyrics about disease and whatever Leica is, there are lyrics about science-fiction nightmares. For a guitarist, bands like The Faceless is your best friend. Their guitar parts are complex but not to the point of frustration (I'm looking at you, Necrophagist, PsyOpus, and Meshuggah) and they are certainly not lacking in chops, don't let the drop C "chug chug breeee" tuning throw you off. They tend to focus on harmony and (gasp) melody rather than atonality. While there is good use of dissonance, there isn't too much. Which is good. I'm rambling so I'll stop. PLANETARY DUALITY IS AMAZING!!!

Hard, driving rhythms, complex riffage, odd time signatures, and brutal vocals seem like a constant of death metal or metalcore bands these days, but no one does it quite like Between the Buried and Me, whose mathcore-like playing has earned them spots on many tours and on Victory Records, where they stick out like a sore thumb among all the other emo, post-hardcore crap bands. The starter "All Bodies" has a riff that keeps on moving like a freight train from hell that won't let up until you pull the CD out of the stereo. The most well known songs on this CD are "Alaska", which got some video play, and "Selkies: The Endless Obsession" with its easily recognizable keyboard riff by vocalist Tommy Rogers. As the album moves along, some soft instrumentals are added in like "Breathe In, Breathe Out", "Medicine Wheel", and "Lazer Speed", which are diversions that leave you off guard for the extreme brutality of "Roboturner", "Backwards Marathon", "Autodidact", and "The Primer". Some of the songs are complex, others are short, but all have an air about them that you've just entered the strange world of Alaska. You're not in Kansas anymore.