A Plea For Purging – A Critique of Mind and Thought

Upon hearing the intro of this CD, I was very worried that I was in for almost forty minutes of mind-numbing breakdowns and mosh parts. I had no preconceived notions; or for that matter, any previous knowledge of this band. But the slow breakdown that I first heard upon placing this disk in my CD tray does eventually give way to something better. Perhaps forty seconds into the song, after said intro, the lead guitar kicks in and any breakdowns suddenly becomes forgivable. I’m not sure how complex the music actually is, but at the very least it sounds impressive.

The high and low frequencies are completely complemented with fully functioning rhythm and leads. The guitar playing is what immediately caught my attention, there’s almost always some crazy high notes being played in rapid succession (Could it be? Proper leads and not just some guy that arbitrarily plays a solo upon feeling the need to?) which seems to be emphasized in every song. The drummer has a really clean sounding bass and snare drum; although that’s all you really hear without paying a lot of attention to what he’s doing. The bass can be properly heard, although he doesn’t do anything that fancy compared to the seemingly complex riffing the guitarists lay down.

As far as disappointments go, I have one: I did not like the vocals. The vocalist has a fairy generic scream that one usually hears from the metal/metal core genre/s. The lyrics were okay, Facedown signs mostly Christian bands, so as you may imagine, the content that some of the bands on said label deal with can become very preachy. A song or two of it is fine by me, but exclusively Christian lyrics gets to be too much; I guess if you’re Christian and this helps empower you, more power to you. But in a scene where being non-religious is openly embraced, this could be a risky endeavour. But I digress, the lyrics on this album got a bit bizarre at times, they seem to indirectly give praise to God through imagery; but they diverge off onto tangents, seemingly covering a topic completely unrelated to the original theme. The vocal delivery completely nullified any strange lyrics though, in every song, they’re shouted with an incoherent scream. A scream I hardly paid attention to.

When it comes down to it, I barely gave any thought to what was being said. The instrumentation had my complete attention until the point where a breakdown would come along and throw me off for its duration. I’m sure some people will be up in arms about how pissed off they are that these kinds of bands are getting signed to record labels. Fortunately the only words they use to describe their feelings are a handful of phrases expressing their opinions on the sexual orientation of the band that they’re currently scorning. So, before you believe anything you read on the internet (which should probably include this), check this band out through the same channels as usual (purevolume, myspace, etc.).