Fallujah - Undying Light (2019)^{Release ID: 5599}

Undying Disappointment

I'll be honest, I've complained about the extremely vocal critics of bands that have gone through lineup or style changes when I believe the band is still putting out perfectly fine material. We all have that one band that we think used to be fantastic, they made one change, and now seemingly everyone dismisses them as if they can never put out good material ever again. Sadly, I'm going to turn into one of those people for a second when talking about Fallujah's Undying Light.

It's something about Fallujah's spacey, dreamlike, and sometimes unfocused sound that really drew me to The Flesh Prevails and, more importantly, Dreamless. Dreamless resonated massively with me for reasons I can't fully explain, but that's how music is sometimes. After hearing Alex Hoffman had left the band and was replaced with a new vocalist, Antonio Palermo, I was pretty apprehensive to come into Undying Light with any sort of confidence. I try my best not to be a shortsighted listener, giving credit where credit is due, and not writing material off just because the group goes in a different direction or takes some risks here or there, but sometimes you just have to take the hit and admit that the direction just isn't any good. Undying Light takes Fallujah and sets a course directly into that eyeball black hole on their album cover, probably never to be seen again.

Undying Light takes all the musical pieces of Fallujah and presents them in a watered-down, samey, and overall uninteresting composition. You can tell it's Fallujah; the guitar tone and spacey, distant, atmospheric elements are still there with a few good riffs like on "Hollow" and "Ultraviolet", but nothing builds, climaxes, or sounds particularly noteworthy. I've heard Fallujah called boring and unfocused in the past, and to a certain extent it's correct to call them unfocused, but that lack of focus built a lot of atmosphere in their previous albums. Undying Light seems legitimately unfocused with no band member really working together. It creates a neat, Fallujah soundscape for sure, but after a few listens of trying to look past the surface it's very apparent that this is a pretty shallow album. It feels like it's tumbling through space with zero direction or purpose. Almost nothing is accented by the drums, the guitar parts hardly work together most of the time, and most of the vocal rhythms and, honestly, the overall vocal performance feels like it was punched into the mix at the very last minute.  

And with that, let's talk about the biggest change for Fallujah in Undying Light: the vocals. I can't say I was the biggest fan of Alex Hoffman's vocals, but for me they worked wonderfully in the context of Fallujah's previous albums. Antonio Palermo's vocals are just not good. Plain and simple. His harsh tone feels super tight, his "cleans" on tracks like "Sanctuary" are laughable, and the range of his voice is extremely limited and just doesn't fit with the album's style. The one singular note that he loves to use over and over is just too high, too harsh, and overall emotionless. Fallujah's vocal rhythms in the past have been all over the place as well, but Undying Light takes that nonsense and turns it up a notch. It really does feel like they were punched in last minute, which is a shame.  

There's some good stuff in here, but it's few and far between especially after 2 or 3 listens. "Sanctuary" is a decent track until Palermo screams "LAZARUS", "Ultraviolet" is okay, "Glass House" is a decent opener, "Distant and Cold" works as the album's one entirely atmospheric track, but that's about it. Just a very disappointing album from another band that couldn't handle a vocalist change, even though some of the ideas could have been so much more.