Face The King Barely Falters, Let Alone Falls: The Burning & The Falling Down EP by Face The King

{Originally published in Loomings}

Call any band “one of the best on Long Island” and every club-crawler and Facebook-er will debate it. But its hard to think anybody would argue that Face The King, an alt-rock quartet containing members of SEER, The Mercurial and Stereo Serenade, earn their place as one of the Island’s most ambitious acts. Their newest EP The Burning & The Falling Down performs an impressive feat for an unsigned band, paying homage to its influences while adapting the style to create their own sound. While most local bands aim to create a radio-friendly single (which Face The King had a few years back with tracks like “Found Wanted” and the Coldplay-esque “View of Things”) and sell out venues to the ADD-afflicted high-school crowd, this new EP shows a band willing to branch out and experiment. Each track showcases a different side of the band’s eclectic taste, with song lengths ranging from under a minute to nearly seven, and each creates a new soundscape to showcase the emotion within the lyrics. The titular track kicks off the EP with a triumphant bang, as the sentiment “There’s a flaw in my design, a crack, a break, a guiding light” changes from a lamentation to an exultation. Those familiar with early Radiohead tracks, particularly Pablo Honey’s “How Do You?” and “Blow Out”, remember a band that had the potential to become a band of somber introspection (which they later became) or of fervent intensity. “The Burning And The Falling Down” is what they’d have sounded like had they chose the latter. Recurring readers will recognize the track “Parachutes” from the film Shadowplay, for which it won “Best Original Song”. The song trades some of the intensity of the opener for the sense of grandeur and sonic theatricality that sets the band apart from the rest of the LI music scene. There’s a graceful nature to Face The King’s strength, an eloquence best highlighted in “Descender”, the small track that bridges “Parachutes” and “Due North”, the EP’s heaviest track which sounds much-akin to frontman Eric’s earlier SEER material. But the throwback hard rock intensity of “Due North” is met and matched by the phenomenal ending track, “Colours”. There is an art to ending an album right. Ending it in a way that makes everything connect, and provides a kind of catharsis to the sonic journey the listener was just taken on. Dark Side of the Moon wouldn’t be nearly as fulfilling without “Eclipse” providing a uniting finale, nor would Ziggy Stardust have the grandiose impact were it not for “Rock and Roll Suicide”. So too does “Colours”, which plays like a more epic Muse, achieve this sensation. The final track allows the entire EP to wash over the listener, and by the end, makes the listener want to head over to a Face The King show, knowing they won’t be part of an audience, but part of an experience. Must hear tracks: “Parachutes”, “Colours”