Face of Anger

Faceless (Noise)
by Brain Varney

This is the type of metal band that I remember from my junior high days. At my school, there were two kinds of heavy metal kids: The ones who listened to the poppy, power-ballad-choked hair metal, and the ones who listened to hard, loud, fast stuff like Anthrax. The members of this second group (which included me) probably would’ve liked Face of Anger. The guitars are loud, the vocalist sounds kinda like James Hetfield, and he’s pissed off about something or other, using phrases like “Lord of all that makes you dead” pretty regularly. I really liked this stuff at the time and, to a certain extent, I still have some affection for it.

But there are two major things missing from most of it (including this record): Good tunes of any sort, and a pummelling rhythm section. You don’t need both of these things to make a powerful hard rock record, but you need at least one. Good songs are always nice to have, but they’re not always necessary. A good example of this is Black Sabbath or, to give a more contemporary example, Atomic Bitchwax. Neither band has many good “songs,” but the rhythm section creates such powerful grooves that songs become unnecessary. Face of Anger’s rhythm section doesn’t do this, and they don’t have any good songs either. So while this record unquestionably sounds good and has some cool-sounding guitar riffs, there isn’t really anything here that sticks after a couple of listens. There’s a pretty good pool of raw materials, so they sound like they could go the song route or the groove route and do a pretty good job either way. And that’s more than I can say for most new metal bands.
(12358 Ventura Blvd. #386 Studio City, CA 91504)