It’s the weekend! What better way to get it started than with the latest installment of “Funeral Doom Friday”. This weekly column looks to shed some light onto some of the darkest, most depressing, and discordant metal out there. Funeral Doom stems from the deepest depths of Death-Doom and Dirge music. Each week, the goal is to highlight some of the newest music or rediscover classic works from some of the earliest bands and originators such as Australia’s Mournful Congregation, United States’s Evoken, UK’s Esoteric and the Finnish Thergothon. Feel free to share your opinions and suggestions in the comments!
The latest stop on this global funeral march that we have been for a few weeks now is in New South Wales, Australia. The state is home to Sydney and many beautiful coasts and beaches, making it a highly sought travel spot. Nestled 90 minutes south of the capital city is East Corrimal, the home to today's feature, Funeral Mourning. This individual force is led by a man who goes by Desolate. He has been active as this Funeral Doom project for just over a decade now and in this time has released two full-lengths as well as a couple demos and a split. His second full-length, Inertia of Dissonance (A Sermon in Finality) is today's focus
Inertia is comprised of six songs totaling roughly 50 minutes of Blackened Funeral Doom. Major compositions "Pallid Coffin Spirit", "Whom Shepard Seeds of Discord", and "Dismal Veil of Nothingness" are broken up by smaller sermons which track less than two minutes in run time. Much like other features who tout Black Metal elements (see Imperceptum for an example), Funeral Mourning splices Scandinavian styling into the plodding, blood-curdling pace at which Funeral Doom synonymously operates at. Much of opener, "Pallid Spirit Coffin", for example, features distant whispers that slowly build into Black Metal hisses while mounting guitars build in an almost operatic crescendo. It is as if Abbath's vocals were played at a quarter of the speed while death consumed the Earth. The subsequent minutes of Inertia of Dissonance only cast the listener further into the void. The instrumental sermons give momentary reprieve, but the adjacent 10 and 18 minute epics push the light out to inconceivable distances.
The disparaging aura Desolate's newest album emits is bolstered by the artwork of Yag Mort and the layout designed by Desolate himself by using grave dirt, blood, leaves, and ink. The total package is a disparaging blast of darkness and death executed in a stunning fashion. Inertia of Dissonance (A Sermon in Finality) is available for purchase on Funeral Mourning's Bandcamp page along with his 2015 demo, Descent MMXV.
