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!
Doom Metal has been warped and contorted since the stormy opening seconds of Black Sabbath's title track first terrorized children's dreams in 1970. Today, Doom presents in various strains and we have become accustomed to soaring guitar riffs, thunderous drums, and clean vocals. Subgenres like Death Doom began to contest some these standards by incorporating harsher vocals in bands like disEMBOWELMENT and Paradise Lost. Funeral Doom took it a step further thanks to Thergothon and Skepticism. It reduced the tempo down to a crawl, built on Death Doom's grimace, and added layers of dark ambiance. Though different in their executions, these various iterations have all maintained a common thread. The eponymous dissonance of Doom. This disharmonious tone that is injected to a listener whether it comes from Stoner Doom Metal or Funeral Doom Metal like this week's feature, Funebrüm.
This week we strip away all that was normal for Funeral Doom Metal and Doom in general. Take out the guitars and leave only the drums and droning, ambient darkness and noise that is joined by far-off, harsh vocals. Funebrüm's newest demo, Pestmortem is emphatically that. This demo is two songs that run a staggering 80 minutes of music. It is understandably a tough sell but a worthy feature and a rewarding experience that challenges what is accepted as Doom Metal. The guitars have been substituted for heavy use of keyboards and effects. Each side is 40 minutes long and prominently feature extended segments of dark ambiance that make the hairs on the back one's neck stand on edge. There are momentary breaks in the noise to jolt a listener with jarring blasts of vocals before the music slips into ominous tones. The terms "immersive" or "atmosphere" often get used to describe music, but in the instance of Funebrüm this is, as a friend put it, "impenetrable". To find your way through it or to conquer it is impossible, but to survive it, even by the tiniest of margins, should be considered a victory. Pestmortem is limited to 50 cassette copies, so be sure to snag yours quickly here, from Signal Rex and Harvest of Death. A sample of Pestmortem is featured below.
https://soundcloud.com/signalrex/funebrum-sample
