Fall Forever

There’s still plenty of room for Fear of Men to grow, but without outside influence, they’re already masters of a unique craft.

One feels that the band's lid has to blow at some point with so much emotional pressure bubbling beneath the surface, but for now, the group remain solid crafters of beautifully tense music.

A darkly glistening, deeply attractive and unexpectedly intelligent use of the album as storytelling device.

In the end, Fall Forever feels more like an exploratory step forward than a head-to-toe reinvention of the band; it will be even more interesting to see where they go from here.

While it's clear that Fear of Men are branching out and exploring different sounds and techniques on this album, the warmth of the first album is missing, and the songs don't always benefit from the experimentation.

It’s fitting the trio recorded it in a repurposed slaughterhouse, because Fall Forever is the work of a band gutting its sound and watching it bleed out.

The contrast of Weiss’ effortlessly sophisticated, crystalline vocals with the icier tone of the band’s newly electronic slant certainly gives Fall Forever special character. Fear Of Men hasn’t survived the sophomore turn without losing a few traces of what made the band so appealing initially, but then again, Weiss says it herself in “Erase (Aubade)”: “I erase these things / I don’t need what I left behind.”