Does This Faceless Cover Need a Personality?

The Faceless take on Shake the Disease, and we learn something about the nature of novelty.

The Faceless released their fourth studio album, In Becoming a Ghost, in 2017. Their second release, Planetary Duality, in 2008 was widely heralded by the metal community, but their follow up in 2012, Autotheism, was arguably less of a success. It wasn’t bad, but seemed to represent a plateau instead of a rise in The Faceless’ output. The critics received it well, but fans were, as ever, divided by the introduction of slower and more methodical elements. Because when you’re an online metalhead, composition and song structure is actually irrelevant; you just choose the hardest heaviest thing you can find and status-post about it in your local basement until someone else calls you soft because they can’t orgasm unless they’re listening to road drills through a concrete amplifier at full volume.

Lyrically, Autotheism seemed to have hopped onto the fedora-tipping r/atheism bandwagon. Various verses contained the kind of ironically preachy tone and lack of self-awareness that characterised the 00s neckbeard discourse. It’s worth noting that the now archetypal ‘in this moment I am euphoric’ quote was posted in 2013, so maybe vocalist Michael Keene wasn’t as behind the curve as it appears in hindsight. Whatever the case, Autotheism shredded beneath a Dorito dust veneer of cringe.

Then five years went by and In Becoming a Ghost dropped, and it was hard to know what to expect. The band’s line up had shifted harder than an F1 driver going through a hairpin, with a slew of departures between 2013 and 2014. In 2015, Keene found himself as the last remaining member of the band, and spent a long time rebuilding the line up. The band’s reputation suffered as they became increasingly notorious for erratic behaviour and less-than-satisfactory live shows, with comments on Keene’s sobriety, lengthy set delays, and no-shows becoming a norm.

Keene acknowledged a heroin addiction in interviews around the release of In Becoming a Ghost, and this hadn’t seemed to have abated in the time after. In 2018 his entire band left again, citing his addiction and unreliability, in addition to accusations of theft and funding misuse. In 2022 The Faceless delivered a show that underwhelmed even the highly sceptical audience, with attendees expressing their disdain on Reddit.

So it’s safe to say that by the release of In Becoming a Ghost, the goodwill that The Faceless’ first two albums had generated for them was more or less gone. While critics received it well and praised its atmosphere and experimentation, the fans were less convinced. While some were enthusiastic about it, others found it uninteresting. The prog elements divided metal heads, as they always do – see Rivers of Nihil – and opinions on the production accused it of being both overdone and subpar.

The late 2010s seemed to see a surge in metal covers of pop songs. Creators like Frog Leap Studios‘ Leo Moracchioli, Anthony Vincent’s Ten Second Songs, and Rob Scallion all finding enthusiastic audiences for their musical efforts, while Children of Bodom covered Britney Spears and the ‘Punk Goes Pop’ compilation saw its seventh volume release in 2017. So there was clearly a market for metal covers of pop songs.

All of which brings us back around to The Faceless’ In Becoming a Ghost. The album features an unexpected cover of Depeche Mode’s 1985 single, ‘Shake the Disease’. An interesting choice for a blistering tech death project, although I suspect the stylistic divide between The Faceless and Depeche Mode was largely the point. Can you turn lo-fi goth pop into a blast beat-laden death metal track? You can turn anything into a blast beat-laden death metal track. Whether the result is worth releasing or not, is another matter entirely.

Depeche Mode’s original is very emblematic of its time, with the signature analogue keyboard synth sound that characterised much of that era’s musical stylings. Even when the 80s was trying to be moody, it couldn’t get away from the jaunty jangles that give its music the synthetic quirky sheen, like someone had painted a smiley face on industrial-strength cellophane and grafted it onto the face of the decade with a nail gun.

By comparison, The Faceless’ blitz of notes and percussion, as expected of any tech death, is ill-fitting for the skin it’s trying to wear. They’ve swapped the fluid 80s synth organ for a more acoustic sounding organ track. And while this does amp up the moodiness, the innate non-seriousness of Depeche Mode’s synth pop offerings clashes with the self-seriousness tone of this cover, and the comic undertone prevails.

The guitar sounds almost thin imitating the keyboards, and the cramped fretwork seems less like well-considered melodies and instead gives the impression of unnecessary overplaying. Depeche Mode’s melodies, by design, weren’t complicated. Trying to insert eight iterations of the same note into a space where one would have been fine doesn’t make the playing any better, it’s just a good way to give yourself RSI. I cant escape the impression of a few guys in an empty warehouse being forced to play in a penguin-style huddle.

A major point of a cover is to take another song and make it yours. Look at Sevendust’s phenomenal cover of The Day I Tried to Live. What madman attempts to cover Soundgarden? And yet they utterly nailed it. It’s a stunning cover, and more to the point, it has Sevendust’s personality stamped all over it. One reason for that is they haven’t done the stupid thing where they just take the source material and ‘make it more metulz’. That’s arguably one of the major dividing lines between good and bad cover songs. It’s why Thou’s cover of 4th of July is entirely underwhelming. They’ve seen the song, and said “but what if it was in Drop A, and 25% slower instead?” Ok…? Such dreary, much wow, very doom, much metulz. Bored now. And this is sort of what The Faceless’ cover of Shake the Disease boils down to, which is surprising given how musically gifted the members clearly are. It’s weird that so many metal covers do a great job of punching some life into run-of-the-mill pop songs and yet the sheer try-harding in The Faceless’ cover means it somehow has less of an identity – if such a thing were, ironically, possible at this point in The Faceless’ career – than the original.

The verses more or less do away with the underpinning melody from the original. There probably isn’t a way to make 80s synth jaunts brooding and gaunt enough for the trve kvlt aesthetics of blackened tech death, and so The Faceless opted for a standard line of atonal picking that is neither memorable nor additive. It sounds a bit like someone has listened to Darkthrone’s Transylvanian Hunger and copied their homework without iterating, embellishing, or adding anything of their own to it. The verses then revert back to the lead into the chorus, which is tonally at polar opposites to the droning verses, and is more comic than effective. Its like stepping out of a frigid Norwegian forest to find yourself in Sesame Street.

Vocally, Keene is as good as ever. His shrieks are raw and his cleans are impressive, and nobody is ever going to accuse the Faceless of poor musicianship. But in the words of Sun Tzu, ‘He will win who knows when to fight and when not to fight.’

I’m not convinced that blastbeats and shrieking add much to this song. The initial verses are underpinned by black metal-inspired atonal guitar drones while Keene shrieks over the top of them. This is a novelty for the first verse, but the problem with novelty music is that once you’ve heard it, you don’t really care anymore. By the end of the second verse it’s just a bit tedious. While a surprising amount of music can receive a real kick from some distorted guitars and decent drumming, Shake the Disease doesn’t translate well to extreme metal. There are too many pointy edges to accommodate the low tone soft boy vibe of Depeche Mode’s music. The effect is less of a welcome genre translation, along the lines of Metallica’s cover of Whiskey in the Jar or Anthrax’s Got the Time, and gives more the impression of an experiment that probably shouldn’t have made it onto the album.

This is solidified by the end of the song, where The Faceless drop the shoehorned-in death screams and play the final chorus as a relatively straight trad metal cover, dropping the ill-fitting blastbeats and opting for a standard 4/4 drum line. Keene’s vocals pair with a soaring mournful guitar line unpinned by the keyboard providing Shake the Disease’s core melody that provides a contrasting soft point for the song to end on. They do reprise the blast beats for a final unfortunate go-around, but the contrast is even more stark by direct comparison. It fits the tone of the original in a way that the fast playing and howling occupying the first two-thirds of the song don’t compliment. The pacing and metre of the vocal line just doesn’t fit well into blast beats and black metal shredding. The pairing of these two elements clashes awkwardly, and while black metal is known for cultivating a deliberate dissonance and auditory discomfort, bands that understand how to use this contradiction, like Batushka or Ulcerate, use atonals and dissonance in an unintuitively complimentary fashion. You don’t get good black metal by just filtering up-tempo slamming through a cinder block. As the black metal scene has demonstrated admirably in the last few years, there’s more to the musicianship than hailing Satan in a concrete basement beneath a frost-bitten forest in Denmark.

The final 40-second denouement uses the mournful electric melody to great effect, pairing the complimentary elements of the music, using the stretched warping notes and what sounds like an ululating synth vocal line to bring out the eerie atonal quality that works brilliantly to set the mood and ambience. This, once again, serves as a contrast point, however, serving to highlight by comparison how ill-fitting the straight forward translation to black metal’s frenzied theatrics is, when shoehorned into more sedately paced song writing. When The Faceless stop trying to force Depeche Mode to be Mayhem, the song works really well.

As with most goth-adjacent bands, the lyrics are juvenile. Depeche Mode’s darkwave offering didn’t even bother with the typical tortured Poe-larping purple prose. It’s just a straight forward teen-angst-ridden ‘nobody understand me, muuuuuum, and I have a crush on some yat, muuuuuum’ affair. The comparison of anxiety to disease is melodramatic, inspiring more amusement than sympathy. But that seemed to be Depeche Mode’s whole shtick, alongside The Cure and so on. Sad sensitive goth kids singing sad sensitive songs for the sad sensitive goth kids scrawling overwrought poetry into the margins of their maths books. Whatever.

If you want good lyricism for sad-boy summer, then go listen to Kentucky Avenue by Tom Waits. That song is a whole fucking anvil.