Killface

Artist: 
Album Title: 
Feeding The Dead
Release Date: 
Monday, March 24, 2014
Label: 
Distribution: 
Review Type: 

Finally! Finally! Finally! It was a promise to have a full album ‘soon’, but it took too long! Anyway, finally here it is…

What I mean is this. Irish act Killface did release the mini-album Faceless via on January 1st 2011. Undersigned was enormously enthusiastic about this stuff (see update of January 4th 2011 within the Archive-tab). Said was, via bio and the band itself, that this mini wasn’t ‘but an appetizer’ for the upcoming full length, but indeed, it took three years, three awfully long, empty years…

But now, finally, here it is: Feeding The Dead, the debut full length by Killface, consisting of nine hymns that clock thirty seven minutes. Once again the material was recorded at the Silverline Studio with producer Ivan Jackman, and distributed through Lugga Music Productions.

What the quintet brings with Feeding The Dead is a marvellous continuation of the Faceless-material. Once again it is a unique balance of modern approaches with a prominent Old School vibe, combining tradition with tremolo melodies, Thrash-edged aggression and darkened Doom-Death elements. Other remarkable elements that did lift up the 2011-mini effort as well: the obscure sound (the whole has something horrific, scarifying, without the sickened Eighties Gore-Grind atmosphere), the huge variation in between the songs and within each single composition, the universal sound (this could be stuff from Germany, Poland, Canada, Belgium, Brazil or, for my part, from Burkina Faso).

Feeding The Dead is pure, is essential, is honest in most aspects. Despite the lack of being renewing, it is refreshing, and I will end with a bold statement: seen from musical point of view, Killface cannot be compared to Italy’s Stigma, but imagine the very same stiff middle-finger-attitude and a comparable vision of combining tradition with modernism… The mental state of mind that makes Stigma’s stuff worth listening will convince to appreciate Killface’s debut full length studio album as well, for sure!

85/100