Dreamless

For everything wrong with 'The Flesh Prevails', which was nearly everything, it deserved some begrudging respect for at least trying and failing miserably. They also managed to write "Chemical Cave" which was, and still is, a lovely song from top to bottom. 'Dreamless' is the cynical, logical next step for a band as widely and mistakenly extolled, feeding into a songwriting process clearly born of directionless momentum and egotism.

Fallujah have very clearly laminated the blueprints to their sound so there isn't a grand divergence on what initially drew in people; syrupy lead lines, antiseptic djent-ish riffing and vague allusions to autistically avoiding eye contact. Their new found hubris has led to a propensity for tiresomely expanded sections with clean guitars and whispering vocals, male and female. The latter often wail into the background of various songs, sometimes two or more layered upon one another such as in "Wind For Wings", for some misguided reason as though the band had the Nier OST on repeat and couldn't get enough breathy female singing.

As bleak and empty as the majority of the songs are, cycling exhaustingly through the same riffs and leads ad nauseum, they get embarrassingly self-indulgent upon stepping out of their comfortable bounds. "Les Silence" is just a terrible M-83 b-side with "Fidelio" being the pointless lead in - you already tried this on "Alone With You" and it was bad enough then. "Dreamless" is a yawning chasm of a song, only impressive in how impotent both the excruciatingly long build up and crescendo manages to be, a pretentious statement of what Fallujah are and where they are headed.

They're going to keep writing like this, bloating their songs out with more and more detritus until it's just a desolate thirty minutes of whispering and maybe an instrument sounding out every minute or so. "Adrenaline" is a good example of what they should be writing, it's not "Chemical Cave" and that last minute should be thrown into a dumpster fire, but the relentless aggression and tasteful technicality is effective.

Unfortunately they're well off the deep end: let them drown.