Essentially, this is post-rock with black metal vocals and that’s that. Key word being ’essentially’ and not post-rock, nor black metal. Obviously, the weight of the music balances everything out to that mopey (post-rock) genre and the vocals, largely the only black metal element, do not really balance the record to the metallic camp, but offset the overall result. The reason for this being the rawness of the vocalist’s approach. He goes by A., and I’d strongly suggest black metal musicians to drop that one letter naming convention because it’s fucking annoying. 

That said A goes all out. His performance is blistering. Not enraged, nor full of vile, piss and ire, but charged with emotion. Or so they might think. Black metal vocals can be delivered at different tempos and they can have different textures which might determine the mood, however for vocalists taking an approach that is this raw and blunt, it is difficult to properly match the mood and emotion of the music. And of that Epitimia have a lot. 

Faces of Insanity is Epitimia’s second full-length and it is surprisingly melodic and doomy. The music is extremely well-crafted but the recording itself is delivered in a rather lo-fi fashion. Meaning, Faces of Insanity sounds a bit like a demo, which does not work in favor of all the textures that are present here. There is also certain mid 90’s quality to Epitimia’s sound. Remember the times when all those death metal bands started to go melodic and decided to branch out into more emotional territories. Epitimia are not Katatonia, but their mid-career hump can be heard here. 

The latter part of the album doesn’t work as well though. Tracks like “Epikrisis VI: Leucotomy” have nice passages, but the melodies are murkier and the verses are not well-crafted and these really do not stand well when compared to how strong the first half is. Opener” “Reminiscentia” is stunning and beautiful in all its raw spirit. It’s just the kind of music that might get you thinking that Epitimia are not just another generic post-rock / black metal blend.