A Faylene Sky's Define Alive is the best metalcore EP you missed out on 12 years ago

Something I don’t always find ways to talk about is the Providence music scene and I’ll be honest, COVID putting me indoors most of the time these days has made me fall pretty behind. Lately, however, it feels like more bands come here, than come out of here, but we are a city in the smallest state. There has been a bit of a revival in Rhode Island with promoters like The Hammer Collective working so closely with venues like Alchemy right in the heart of the city. When I was a teen though and coming up in this scene I remember venues like Lupo’s, The Living Room and Club Hell, as well as the bands that played in them. Of course we had the big names come tour through here but bands like Scare Don’t Fear, Absence of Despair and Shadow of a Doubt were titans as much as they were just members of the community. I implore you to look into those bands, all of which (except AoD) have long since broken up now, but one band in particular that I feel was very lost to time was A Faylene Sky.

Like the others I mentioned, AFS headlined the local shows all the time and were starting to come up with a legacy of their own. They did what any hardworking DIY act does, paid their dues, started to headline, started to tour and even signed to Tragic Hero with whom they released one full length; 2013’s Hell is Where the Heart Is. Somewhere after that the band split citing their then vocalist, Troy Ray, becoming a father. In 2019 they played a single reunion show at Pawtucket, RI’s The Met and said it would become an annual thing, but I think the pandemic ultimately threw a wrench in that plan. If you go on streaming services you can still listen to every AFS track. They had the record I mentioned earlier, there is a self-titled “album” but, between you and me, that’s just every song that dropped on MySpace or Pure Volume and didn’t get a formal inclusion on a record and an EP, which we’re going to have a discussion about below, Define Alive.

The EP opens with its title track, well, on streaming it does anyway. See, on the CD there is an album intro, roughly half a minute, that samples several famous film quotes. (Ex. “Life is like a box of chocolates.”) These being played over a layer of a flatline and static, before the beep in the flatline goes into the real first song. This song also had a remix and remaster release, sort of covertly, in 2019, which I think was to go with that reunion show. I think this was widely looked at as the band’s “hit” song if you could call it one. What grabbed me about this right away is it’s just as catchy as it is heavy. I feel in modern metalcore a lot of bands fear giving way to “formulaic” songwriting and forget that it can work in metal as much as it can in other genres. This chorus gets me every single time. That and everything in this song is tight-knit. The percussion roll compliments the riff, the riff compliments the lead vocal melody making everything stand out.

If you read my Cobra Starship legacy review recently, you’d have seen me pan 2000s pop for using a live-relient, call and response strategy on many studio recordings. There is however a flip side to that, which this EP does very well starting at “Three Years from Now.” This song uses many increments of crowd vocals as backing vocals and while they sound like an audience reaction they are not live-relient. If you were to see this song performed live and you didn’t know to play along it would be just as easy for another band member to sing or scream in the background, you’d think it was just part of the song. If you were to listen to “Nice Guys Finish Last” by Cobra Starship however, it’d be pretty silly to watch a call and response between two band members. Even in the mosh call-esque moment;

“Never give up till they know who we are.”

It could go off without a hitch if it was just said verbatim. I also want to quickly discuss this song's transition into the next. There is the sound of howling wind that takes you into track three or four and on streaming it sounds so smooth. On CD though there is a strange delay that just cuts to silence before it goes into it. I’m assuming that was a limitation the band dealt with at the time.

Speaking of that transition, the wind howling isn’t the only thing that carries into “I Wasn’t Born Again Yesterday.” The song’s first vocal is in that same crowd style only this time it goes back and forth with the lead. So in a way it creates a call-and-response that actually works. Another little tool this song uses is making classic core breaks sound a bit more interesting. For example, almost every metalcore song has some mid section with chugging going on for a while and this does that but adds a little guitar lick in there every now and again. It’s things like this that make the classics not so monotonous.

On the two pre-signing EPs A Faylene sky made heavy use of static as ambiance and, no disrespect, but I feel “Oh, I’ll Show You a Nightmare” was the only real effective use of that sonically. The track sort of sounds like it's tuning in from a radio right at the beginning and there is a distorted vocal that leads into the actual song with a drumroll. To me, the best moment on this whole release is the vocal melody on;

“Baby I’m okay just say what you say in the worst way.”

Paired with the riff that goes back and forth with that sequence of lines. Again we make effective use of the crowd vocals too. In the chorus the backing vocal sounds like an audience, another example of a moment that could never truly be ruined live because of the constraints of the song. This song is full of it’s own unique songwriting tools too though. The second pre-chorus is cut short with a brand new instrumental, it bait and switches you into thinking that you’ll get more of that effective, quieter melody but instead you get something that works as an even stronger suspension tool. It has a very effective bridge using the hook of the song with bare percussion, which turns into a guitar solo, which then turns into a bare chant. Again, doesn’t have to go over well live, but when it does? It creates something that's a mosh call then a moment to bring everyone together to sing along. It’s a very well crafted “-core” song overall and if you don’t listen to this whole record but you’re a fan of the genres I definitely recommend this track over the others.

Something the 2000s scene was big on, at least to my memory, were songs that work as both first and last tracks. For example, I See Stars “What This Means to Me” was the opening track to an EP but then after they had their debut full length it was the last track and they used it to close out sets for a long time. That’s also true of “Last Call for Lost Souls.” This was the first track on the band’s first ever EP of the same name and here it’s a stepped up closer. Honestly I think it works better as a closer, but I can see the artistic move either way.

At the end of the day, I’m writing this because I always felt AFS deserved better, they feel lost to time and despite doing it all well I never really felt they had their due. What I think sets this EP apart from their contemporaries at the time is the blending of the two ends of the genre spectrum they were in. Metalcore has clear roots in metal itself, it’s in the name! However, a heavy metal song and a metalcore song are two totally different things. I always felt this band hit the catchy yet technical aspects of heavy metal and blended them perfectly with the hardcore aspects of the other end of the rope. I have trouble getting into heavy modern music and I always felt this set the bar for me. It’s a treasured piece of my physical music collection and I hope I inspired you to give it a listen as well.

Follow me on Twitter

A Faylene Sky's FaceBook