WEST OF ELYSIUM - Faceplant
On their second LP, Faceplant source their eclectic emo from disparate threads of music history to weave a cohesive, and often powerful, whole.
Faceplant’s West of Elysium feels almost endlessly referential. First, there’s the title, which transports East of Eden’s titular biblical allusion into Greek mythology, carrying with it a nearly infinite presupposed gravity. Then there’s the music, which takes notes from the past forty years of musical innovation and with them synthesizes some of the most eclectic emo music in recent memory. The references that West of Elysium makes in its 35-minute runtime are multitudinous enough to fill a small library. While these points of comparison largely define Faceplant’s second LP, however, they rarely overwhelm the music contained within.
Throughout West Of Elysium, Faceplant wear their myriad musical influences on their sleeves. There’s the Godspeed You! Black Emperor-beholden instrumental “Song for Mark Hollis”; there’s mewithoutYou’s theological folk-heavy post-hardcore strewn throughout “Nothing, Nowhere, No One”; there’s the chilling emptiness of The Microphones in the negative spaces of “You’ve Moved On”; there’s even Incubus—of all bands—bubbling beneath the surface of “Reclaimed”’s still water.
Even though Faceplant clearly owe tribute to the seminal bands that have come before them (and Incubus), their genre-melding never brings itself to pure mimicry. Ryan Watson’s vocals, deep and uneasy, are singular in emo, a genre that practically lives in the upper end of the vocal register. The blend of effects-laden electric guitar and acoustic strumming at the end of “Reclaimed” claims post-rock’s emotional weightiness without giving into its long-played-out loud-soft-loud tropes. “Threads That Bind” boasts a guitar line reminiscent of nearly any post-hardcore act after 2000, but it also features the prettiest chorus on the album, adorned by shimmering guitars that wriggle their way around Watson’s impossibly deep vocals.
Unsurprisingly for an emo record, the songs on West Of Elysium often center loss and the ensuing grief above all else. An unnamed “you” is often the object of loss here—the opening track, “Reclaimed”, ends by asking, “how do I fall asleep and wake up without you again?” and the closer, “Heaven’s Waters Hath No Waves”, finds Watson longingly singing, “I can still see the candle in your window.” Of course, that line is immediately followed by, “I wish they had buried you deeper,” a line that in most other angst-driven emo music would be vitriol spat at an ex-lover. Here, however, Watson projects futility in the face of profound loss, helplessness driven by love rather than hate. “Threads That Bind” contains the album’s most direct meditations on dying, describing a character who “put[s] [their] corpse to bed,” whose “graying hair arrive to [their] head” as if by witchcraft.
The loss in West of Elysium, depicted through prose and through poetry, is immediate and real, almost suffocating Watson on “Your Ghost” even as he yearns to only be a voice. When Watson croons “hopelessness is easy/hopelessness is everywhere” on “Nothing, Nowhere, No One”, it’s easy to see why. When hope does appear on West of Elysium, it arrives as a plea rather than a promise; hope underscores the prayers of “Lord forgive me” that open the record and is held within the begging lines of “hold me/love me/never let me go” that close it. Never is this hope fully denied, but rarely does it feel likely to arrive.
The arrangements on West Of Elysium consistently point to an ambition far beyond Faceplant’s lo-fi recording limitations. “Your Ghost” quickly explodes from an indie folk curiosity into a wall of sound driven forward by a hauntingly gorgeous piano line, while “The Empty City” drifts serenely between hissing trains and screeching guitars, never losing sight of the splintered relationship at its center. The guitars of “Nothing, Nowhere, No One” drone seemingly interminably, until the full-band release carries Watson through his howls of “watch my spirit die.”
On each of these songs, however, the band’s ambition remains largely muddied by less-than-stellar production that occasionally threatens to pummel Faceplant’s walls of sound into mush. Nowhere is this clearer than on “Nothing, Nowhere, No One”, which fails to give the final refrain and Watson’s accompanying cries of “when will the rain fall?” the emotional magnitude they deserve.
In a sense, the production-based limitations Faceplant encounter throughout West of Elysium parallel the constraints inherent to their music’s referential nature. Just as Faceplant’s outsize arrangements are confined to the musical acts they pay tribute to, so too are they constricted by the simple act of being recorded. The musical ideas throughout West of Elysium are often powerful and occasionally unique, and Faceplant clearly have many more things they are not quite ready to say. We should all look forward to the day they are.