Vehemency
On paper, October Falls sounds fabulous. Sorrowful folk / black metal with acoustic passages. Clear yet earthly production. Professional execution with every instrument. But still there is something that doesn't hook me, and I believe it has something to do with the OVERLY emotional flow of the album. There is no room for anything else but grandiosity after grandiosity, be it in the form of an acoustic interlude or a fast burst of black metal. Everything is bittersweet, epic.
This is the same problem that I see in every previous October Falls release too. A Collapse of Faith is the band's third metal release - in total there are 7 releases of which some are purely acoustic - and unfortunately I am disappointed by it. Surely it's beautiful and it's clear that lots of thought has been put into making this massive one-song album (divided into 3 parts). The third part, especially, is something I do enjoy, but the preceding two parts (both around 18 minutes) don't do much for me. Especially because during those parts there is that certain melody pattern that keeps repeating itself in various forms, and unluckily the melody is not above mediocre.
Lehto's airy screams are fitting and overall A Collapse of Faith isn't exactly bad, but it is... somehow uninspired, in the sense that I feel like I've heard these melodies already before. If you have enjoyed the previous outputs by October Falls you might like this too, but for me it consists of too familiar melodies, and a bit too exaggerated amount of beauty so that its effect is inverse, sounding dull in turn.