It has been a long time since MetalReviews.com covered Fallujah, a four-piece band currently based in Nashville, Tennessee - over ten long years since the last review, and even longer for your correspondent witnessing the band live as support for Suffocation and Cephalic Carnage back in 2013! Since then this band has released a further four full-lengths pushing their brand of melodic and technical death metal, culminating in June's Xenotaph, and although they've not gone ignored totally none has hit quite as hard as this album does. It's a step sideways from the usual technical death sturm und drang and perhaps the lightest material the band have released to date; frequently if not obsessively drenched in clean singing and keyboards, not to mention infectious hooks. You'd be forgiven for wondering if Fallujah are death metal at all at certain points, not least the melodies of opener In Stars We Drown, clean vocals and layered melodies making their presence known before the snarls and riffs start around the midpoint, the clean singing returning as a counterpoint if not the focus there and throughout the album.

If you have a case against Fallujah, it's that it sometimes seems like they'd rather be a prog metal band than a death metal one, however technical. First track proper Kaleidoscopic Waves gallops in aggressively but quicky leans more towards the former than the latter, clean singing and instrumental interplay impressing to the point where the harsh vocals and technical widdlery seems performative rather than heartfelt. Yet what saves Fallujah from such accusations is how good they are at combining the two, linking everything with frequent hooks that make the music fun and interesting to listen to even if you're not sure which world it stands in - Kaleidoscopic Waves is a great example of how it all comes together to entice the listener in, and it's easy to see why the band chose it as a video track and first single.

Yet it's also the lightest piece on the album; elsewhere, when Fallujah really push their technical death metal side, you can hear their skill. Labyrinth of Stone and Step Through the Portal and Breathe are solid if melodic examples with their focus on the groovy guitar assault alongside the snarled vocals like a more prog-tinged Psycroptic. The latter leans a little more towards the dreamier side of the band with those complex lead guitar melodies and a late-track clean sung section but generally sticks to tech death for the most part - a calmer, less savage Gory Blister for another touchstone? For an actual mixing of the two styles look no further than The Crystalline Veil, mixing both aspects of the band extremely well, the dreamier clean vocals and prog aspects sitting atop the tech death base.

And although this isn't the longest album ever at just over forty minutes, the band use their time extremely well and keep the songwriting honed and sharp throughout. A Parasitic Dream is a little more spacy and dreamlike without lessening the aggression and melancholy, whilst The Obsidian Architect takes steps into Meshuggah territory with those crushing initial riffs before opening into something much more progressive and even avant-garde with the sheer number of switch-ups. After that the closing title track has a more grandiose and epic feel that suits its place in the tracklisting, again without lessening the aggression but channelling it into the sort of blastbeat-backed stormer that finishes the album especially well. It's hard to see where Fallujah have put a foot wrong here, not least in balancing the various aspects to its sound without lessening its impact. Many bands try to stand out from the prog metal or tech death field; Fallujah are one of the rare examples of how to do both well, at once, being equally skilful instrumentally with better songwriting skills, and as such deserve their success and are an easy recommendation for all.