ALBUM REVIEW: Death From Beyond – Fäust
Before anybody panics, FÄUST is the solo project of Michaël Hellström from the French alps and bears no relation to the homophobic murderer of the same name – don’t you see the umlaut!? Maybe it’s not the most sensible choice for a band name in this sphere of music, but fortunately their debut album Death From Beyond gets the rest right. It’s an ideal soundtrack as we roll into the thick of winter – an icy blast of melodic blackened death metal that sounds like plenty we’ve heard before but is still done well enough to merit the price of admission.
A one-man band through and through, Hellström sings and plays absolutely everything here, and he clearly has all the essentials nailed down. There seems to be a particular emphasis on the blackened element of his sound, with opener When Death Spawns Fire‘s grand intro soon launching into the blast beats, tremolo-picked guitars and rasped vocals which are very much this album’s primary tools. It shouldn’t come wildly out of left field for anyone who’s ever heard DISSECTION before, but if you want something that sounds like Storm Of The Light’s Bane with a bit of a production tool-up and made by, well, not DISSECTION, then this record will absolutely hit the spot.
It does kind of all mesh into one though. The tempo varies here and there – essentially from blasty and thrashy down to the occasional slower riff or groove – and there is the inevitable synth pad/clean guitar/choral vocal interlude of Ashes a little way past the halfway mark, but other than that Death From Beyond plays out largely as a single bracing wash of generally quite good extreme metal. The track that bucks this trend a little is the album’s seventh, Night Eternal; perhaps because it comes directly after Ashes, this one just hits a touch harder than almost everything else, its slower tempo conveying something more thunderous before Hellström’s propulsive double kicks drive things back up to more windmill-inducing fury for the song’s final third.
Other than that, the main thing to spotlight here would be Hellström’s performance as a lead guitarist. This is quite naturally where most of the melody comes from, and there’s at least one killer solo on all seven of the full tracks on offer here. Maybe you would expect nothing less from an album of this kind, but the fact remains that music like this needs that epic, soaring element to really succeed, and Hellström is clearly an accomplished enough musician and song-writer to make that happen.
Ultimately though, Death From Beyond is an album that sticks to a pretty well-established formula, and how you feel about it is likely to depend on your appetite for that formula in general. This isn’t some kind of game-changing record that’s going to win over anyone who’s already indifferent to melodic blackened death metal, but at 35 minutes in length it does everything it needs to in a sensible enough space of time that it will definitely be worth a few spins for those already on board with the genre.
Rating: 7/10
Death From Beyond is set for release on December 9th via self-release.
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