It’s the weekend! What better way to get it started than with the latest installment of “Funeral Doom Fridays”. 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, my 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!
Funerary is a five-piece band from Phoenix, Arizona that has been creating a variety of funeral doom metal infused with a bit of blackened sludge. They follow in a similar vein as bands like Lycus and Fórn. There are also prominent influences from fellow funeral doom band, Asunder, and sludge bands such as Graves At Sea or Noothgrush. The gentlemen in Funerary formed in the early parts of 2013 and released the single, "Beneath the Black Veil", and eleven and a half minute beast of slow, torturous agony.
In 2014, Funerary assembled their full-length debut, Starless Aeon, which saw a release through Midnite Collective in August of that year. At roughly thirty-four minutes long, the album is easily digestible and great enough to put on repeat a couple times. "Beneath the Black Veil" is featured among Starless Aeon's five songs, serving as the centerpiece in which the album is built around. The five songs seem to string together, forming one long and grandiose funeral doom epic. The album's structure is incredibly balanced, interchanging its longer songs with its short ones. The three minute "Atonement" and title track come before and after "Beneath the Black Veil", respectively, and feature some of the album's biggest funeral doom moments.
Starless Aeon got a re-release through Sentient Ruin Laboratories in July of 2015, sparking some of the hype it received following its initial arrival. It was a well-executed debut album from a promising young group that is playing a new, exciting take on funeral doom metal. The distorted sludge added to an already discordant genre of music is creating a dark, new demon in doom metal. Funerary is showing all of the signs of a breakout in the future and joining some of their contemporaries on advancing the genre. They released a killer split with the sludge band, Ooze, in 2015 that is well worth a listen.
