Fact - Self-titled Album Review

Rating: 4 out of 5

Review of Fact's self-titled album.

Fact are a Japanese 5 piece metal hardcore band and love face masks for some reason. All the photos of the band, and even the album cover, show them wearing weird doll face masks. Are they trying to hide something or are they embarrassed about their album?

Metal hardcore, for me, is a restricted style of music and often everything of this style tends to meld into one sound, again, for me that is. Bands such as Slipknot managed to expand on this genre and take it in a slightly different direction, probably the reason for their mainstream success.

No doubt all the hardcore. hardcorists, will pick the meat off the bones on this one due to the fact that .. Fact are not really the norm. Or maybe that will give them extra appeal, Im not sure, but whatever the outcome it remains that the album is not all that bad. And I'm not even a huge fan of this type of music.

There is some excellent guitar work and phenomenal drumming. On some of the tracks admittedly you can tell that English is not their first language, but it doesn't really make much difference, it still sounds good. One of the highlights to this album is the production quality, you can tell a lot of thought and work has gone in to each track, and each is very well produced.

The downside of the album is that occasionally you get a strong influence of mainstream American EMO coming through, but it's bearable; they do serve up a helping of hardcore whenever this occurs to soften the pallet anyway.

I'm not sure why I thought I wouldn't like this album, maybe it was the masks, maybe it's because we don't hear too much Japanese music in the West. Based on this album however, I would like to see us get more of it, Fact do not need to be embarrassed about their debut whatsoever.

4/5

Pablo Roffey