by Benji Heywood (@benjiheywood)
It’s nearing midnight in a small club on Los Angeles’ east side. The headliner has already played and there is one band to go. The crowd has thinned and the fifty or so who remain are milling about sucking at the ice left in their drinks. From the side stage gloom, a group of gaunt figures dressed in black emerges and picks up their instruments. They are called Disappears and they proceed to absolutely slay for the lucky few who stuck around. Flashforward ten years and I’m anxiously looking ahead to June of this year, when FACS, the band co-founded by Brian Case and Noah Leger of Disappears will return to that same stage and will most likely deliver the effect I experienced all those years ago: utter astonishment.
As transcendent an experience as seeing Disappears was, on album it felt like the music was hinting at something grander, an as-of-yet unrealized expansiveness. The band flirted with these possibilities on 2015’s Irreal, which paired Case’s sleek, hypnotic guitar parts with Leger’s bombastic drumming, but the transformation wasn’t fully realized until FACS’ Trouble In Mind debut, the transfixing Negative Houses in 2018. Songs like “Houses Breathing” doubled down on repetition and put Case’s vocal delivery front-and-center in the mix, with captivating, if unsettling, results.
Lifelike, the FACS album from 2019, saw further lineup changes, with bassist Alianna Kalaba bringing an assured slinkiness to the group, unlocking counterrhythms that propelled songs like “Another Country” and “Teenage Hive” from 2020’s Void Moments to new levels of serpentine catharsis. After FACS’ 2021 landmark album, Present Tense – which, with its close-mic’d drums and broken musicbox guitars, acted as a brief detour from FACS typically explosive palette – the band now returns with Still Life in Decay, their accessibly haunting and darkly beautiful new album. It’s the band’s crowning achievement.
Anyone in the game as long as FACS will tell you, you can put the ingredients of an album together in similar ways and still yield wildly disparate results. Still Life in Decay sounds grander than any previous FACS album. This does not mean earlier albums lacked for auditory quality – far from it. However, something about these sessions at Chicago’s celebrated Electrical Audio with renowned engineer Sanford Parker has yielded the boldest, clearest, most compelling collection of songs of the band’s career. Chalk it up to one last hurrah for Kalaba – who, after recording, has been replaced by FACS co-founder and ex-Disappears bassist Jonathan van Herik – or just a really good set of days at the office for Parker. Whatever the reason, Still Life in Decay sounds IRL massive, as if we the listeners are sharing the live room with the band as it recorded.
Album opener “Constellation” is a song of two halves, establishing its menacing motif by slicing through the wall of mechanical feedback at the song’s outset. The bass quakes as if played through a classic 70s SVT head at absolute max volume. We can almost feel the reverberations of the eight by ten cabinet in our chest, even when listening to the song at moderate volume. On the song’s melodic second half, Case plays a mesmerizing lick in five, his guitar brightly twinkling over Leger’s get-up-and-go drum track and Kalaba’s thunderous bass. Despite the song’s brief (for FACS) runtime, it serves as a thesis statement for Still Life: crescendos built around undulating guitars, repetitive bass riffs, propulsive drum grooves, and Case’s trademark talk-singing in a long empty hall.
Like multiple instances of interconnectedness between songs on Still Life in Decay, the band gives us little time to ruminate on its thesis, launching immediately after the close of “Constellation” into “When You Say.” This – as well as frontloading Still Life with its three most energetic tunes – is by conceptual design. There’s a repetitive sense of loss strung throughout the album’s music and lyrics. Street names change, delays decay, hooks disappear and reappear abruptly with little reason. It’s as if the album were an echo of Basinski’s Disintegration Loops. It may be two decades later, but to FACS, the disconnect between meaning and modern life punctuated by the earlier collapse of the twin towers is only accelerating. If the 90s saw the end of history, the 21st century is the harbinger of what comes after and judging by the foreboding soundscape of Still Life in Decay, it’s not good.
Bitter pills often take some sugar to swallow. In reply, “When You Say” and “Slogan” – the album’s second and third tracks – are the best FACS songs to date. Every element showcased here is a hook, from the muscular rhythmic swagger of “When You Say” to the hypnotizing sonic triptych of “Slogan” to Case’s commanding vocal delivery on each. Case has long championed a style in which he conjures mimical sounds from his electrified guitar. A cursory tally of Still Life’s guitar chameleonism includes harp, fluegelhorn, piano, warped church bells, a bomb siren, and all manners of dystopic technological noise. This devil’s magic is effectively deployed across the album’s six songs, but really shines on “When You Say” – from its John Carpenter-esque tension benders to its sea-stricken siren wails – and on “Slogan,” where the guitar sounds like a detuned vibraphone before exploding into a violent echoing shimmer.
The back half of Still Life in Decay is meditative yet more conceptually provocative than the album’s first half. Kalaba’s bass on “Class Spectre” rumbles as if she weren’t even picking, instead just forming chords across the fretboard and pressing down, allowing the bass cabinet’s own feedback in the room to resonate the strings. To have a bass sound void of any classic attack that does nothing but, well, attack is a cool breadcrumb on an album scattered with them. In fact, one could isolate Leger’s drum tracks alone and have an enjoyable listen, such is the musicality and intention with which he plays, highlighted by his performance on the album’s second side.
“Still Life in Decay” (shortened to “Still Life” on non-Bandcamp streamers) acts as the album’s conceptual center despite its late arrival in the album’s sequencing – something about the center cannot hold perhaps? Over a start-stop drum break, an arching, forlorn bass riff, and a funhouse mirror guitar loop, Case sings with his vocals hectored by slap-back, allowing the song to gnash and chime into its own echo, which blooms and decays, blooms and decays, for a full three minutes after the instrumentation ends. It’s a gorgeous and deeply moving coda to a surprisingly evocative entry in FACS emotionally gray discography.
FACS is, at heart, a heavy band, but “Still Life in Decay” and album closer “New Flag” paint a more nuanced picture of what it means to play heavy music in an era of temporal decomposition. By the advent of Still Life‘s crushing crescendo, I’d gone somewhere in my mind that a FACS album traditionally hasn’t taken me. Yes, it’s still a lonely place, but comforting, like a sensory deprivation chamber or watching a storm roll in from your front porch. Whatever’s left of this world when we’re done with it, Still Life in Decay will remain a definitive statement by a band at the peak of its power. Hopefully, there will still be some of us who stuck around late enough to hear it.