���Album number three from this Russian experimental black metal outfit, delivered mostly through a multi-part prog rock style epic titled Epikrisis I-VI. The first song sets the album's morose vibe with a sprawling instrumental that combines eerie tremolo-picked melodies and icy, blackened riffs with a suffocating sense of melancholy reminiscent of the darker, earlier stuff from The Cure; from the introduction, the trio move through the six-part "Epikrisis", moving from mournful, lumbering post-rock flecked with wintry blackened melodies and bursts of celestial electronics, the sound streaked with guttural, snarling vocals, then suddenly erupting from tangles of weird proggy guitar into raw blasting black metal. There's some great folky singing that pops up at a couple of points, and even the blackened leads can reveal something of a Slavic folk influence beneath their sorrowful melodic laments, and there are moments of unexpected jazziness that suddenly spring up on tracks like "Epikrisis III - Megalomania", as well as some great use of dreamy, shimmering guitar atmospherics that suddenly break away from the band's grimy black metal into passages of strange, Badalamenti-esque ambiance. Their vocals are pretty varied, from that aggressive blackened snarl to clear singing to a frantic high-pitched squawk that falls somewhere in between Silencer and old-school emo, and the album's capped off with a gorgeous piece of dark Souvlaki-esque shoegaze sumptuousness titled "Lethe" that's likewise pretty striking.

���With its occasional moments of sloppy musicianship and occasionally awkward transitions, Faces is definitely more raw and rough around the edges than their follow-up album (Un)reality that came out earlier in 2014, and at this stage in their career the band's ambitions still outpaced their skill level. I still dug the album's spirited mix of grubby gloom-rock and oddball proggy black metal though, and there are a couple of moments of enthralling despair that are laid out on songs like the supremely catchy "Epikrisis V : Rorschach Inkblot" and "VI: Leucotomy", where you can see the band's skill for crafting moody, soaring, almost Katatonic hooks within their depressing blackened sound beginning to fully take shape.