The Faceless and AngelMaker at Crocks, 19 June 2018

The Faceless reached Thunder Bay with almost nobody left from the record they were touring. On 19 March 2018 the vocalist, a guitarist and the drummer all announced they were leaving, which put the band’s founder, Michael Keene, on his own. A new lineup was revealed about a month later, and this Tuesday night at Crocks came two months after that.

The band formed in 2004 in Encino, a district of Los Angeles, around Keene and the bassist Brandon Giffin. Keene is the one founding member still in the group, and the band has been his project through every change since. Its style is technical death metal, a branch of the genre built on speed and complicated song structures.

A slow catalogue

The albums came slowly. Akeldama appeared in 2006 and Planetary Duality in 2008, and Autotheism followed in 2012. Then came a five-year gap before In Becoming a Ghost in 2017, released on Sumerian Records. Four records in eleven years is a light schedule, and each one had to carry a long stretch of touring.

That gap matters for the room. Anyone in the crowd at Crocks in June 2018 had waited a long time for a new record and then watched most of the band walk out within months. The Thunder Bay date sat between those two facts. It was an early chance to hear the material with the new people.

The support act and the route

AngelMaker was named on the bill, and the tour announcement said the band would join at most stops. They are a deathcore band from North Vancouver, formed in 2011, whose album Dissentient came out in 2015.

In 2017 they won a fan contest that put them on the Summer Slaughter tour. Deathcore borrows from hardcore as well as death metal, which made the pairing a related but different sound. For a band from British Columbia, a run that ended in Vancouver was also a route home.

The run covered nine dates. It began at the Montebello Rockfest in Quebec on 16 June, went to Toronto the next day, and reached Thunder Bay on the 19th. Winnipeg was next, then Regina, Calgary, Edmonton and Kelowna, and the run finished in Vancouver on 25 June. Only two of the nine stops were in Ontario.

What the ticket cost

Tickets cost $20. Across the twelve 2018 shows with a price in this record, admission ran from $13 to $40, and $20 put this night in the lower middle. It was cheaper than the Sebastian Bach show six days later, which was priced at $40, and more than the $15 asked for Rivers of Nihil eighteen days on.

Those three nights show how varied a Thunder Bay summer could be for a club that hosted them. A death metal band on a Tuesday, a former Skid Row singer the next Monday and a progressive death metal headliner on a Saturday all fit into about three weeks at the same address.

The weekday

A Tuesday in June is not an easy night to fill. The band played Quebec on the Saturday and Toronto on the Sunday, and the Monday between Toronto and Thunder Bay had no show at all. That gap is one way of reading why the northern date landed midweek, though no reason was given.

The lineup was the story of the tour. When the dates were first announced in April, coverage noted that no one had yet been named to play alongside Keene on the road. The new players were revealed before the summer dates, so they are the natural bet for who stood on the Crocks stage, though the record does not name them.

Crocks was then a downtown room on Cumberland Street South. On 5 October 2018 the Crocks name moved to a nightclub building on Red River Road, after about nine years at the old address. The rest of that year’s nights are gathered on the shows page, and this one falls in the final summer on Cumberland Street.