The last time I listened to Fallujah was five or so years ago, around the time when they released Dreamless. I can’t say that I was impressed or anything of the sort, but I did spin that album for a short while, until I basically all but forgot about the existence of the band. I wasn’t even aware they made an album back in 2019 and only gave them some attention recently. Yeah, I know, not a very encouraging note to kick off an album review, but bear with me here.
What brought my attention back into the mix was the new single, “Radiant Ascension”. It sounded surprisingly fresh and enjoyable. I mean, sure, it’s not something to put up in the Death Metal Hall of Wonders, but it’s well above the average of what you’ll usually find in the genre. So, I decided I need to give Empyrean a proper listen as soon as possible.
Let’s rip the band aid off quickly. The first thing that got to me was the production. I’ll find myself giving albums a lot of flack for dirty, messy, gritty, loose, unbalanced, and generally un-clean production. I’m a huge snob about production value and I’m not afraid to show it. Although, in this case, it falls too much on that end.
The production is so clean that it ends up being linear, sterile, hermetic, over-compressed, and a little trebly as I see it. Granted, it’s not at a level of being eye-gouging-obvious, but it gets to you if it’s the kind of thing you aren’t a big fan of. I can’t say that it makes the album less enjoyable, it’s not that tragic, but on repeat listens it will make the record feel kind of uniform and loose character so to speak.
To me at least, it also feels like the band is further embracing their prog death sound, going further into the meat of all that. Although, I can’t say that I’m exactly thrilled with the quality of the songwriting as a prog album. The way it’s laid out, it basically checks all the baseline boxes to fit into that stencil, but it doesn’t do anything to really earn it.
There are a lot of fun, engaging, and exciting parts through the runtime of Empyrean, like the middle section of “Into the Eventide”, whose ending wraps up that whole deal neatly. The aforementioned “Radiant Ascension” has a fairly outstanding second half, which adheres to similar values. There are great riffs around, like the opener for “Eden’s Lament”, or the one in the latter half of “Mindless Omnipotent Master”.
Yes, there’s a ‘but’ incoming. But even though we have plenty of fun moments to hang on to, I don’t think there’s enough to make the record really stand out among its peers. My gripe in that sense is that it just doesn’t feel there are any particularly memorable moments, something that would really stick with me after it stops playing, even with multiple subsequent listens.
Empyrean is probably about as good as Dreamless in terms of overall quality, and definitely well above Undying Light — if I had to quantify it like that. So, I can’t really say if it’s a step forward, or a step in the same place. Ultimately though, there are some things I had a good time with, even if I wasn’t blown away in a general sense. It’s not something to wow about, but it’s nice.
