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, 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!
Makoto Fujishima is the man behind Weird Truth Productions, the do-it-yourself record label that has been home to numerous releases from many great Funeral Doom Metal bands. The label's alumna include Mournful Congregation's The Book of Kings and The Monad of Creation as well as Ataraxie's Slow Transcending Agony. Fujishima has been running Weird Truth for seventeen years now in addition to being a merchant/musician of doom. He originally played a one-man Death-Doom project called Nyarlathotep and has since been in a number of other projects, including Funeral Doom band, Funeral Moth. Formed in 2005, Fujishima released a demo and an EP in the first three years of the band's existence before releasing Dense Fog in 2014, some six years later. The releases for Funeral Moth have been fairly scarce, and that is forgivable seeing as Fujishima is busy running a record label. Thankfully, Funeral Moth has set aside some time to release a new album this week to follow up their 2014 album.
Transience is listed as a full-length release, however it runs relatively short. Consisting of only two songs, a twenty-two-minute title track and an eighteen-minute track called "Lost, it stands to be one of the smaller releases that has been covered in this column. Transience also is one of the most unique releases featured in Funeral Doom Friday. Fujishima and company have a much crisper and airier sound than the typical crushing, bleak sounds that one regularly associates to Funeral Doom. The album cover should shed some light on how the album emulates lament. If the music of bands like Fórn or Bell Witch are analogous to sitting in a tomb, staring into the dark; Funeral Moth's music is looking out on the waves of a foggy ocean in remembrance of souls passed. Much of the focus for the album lies in the minimal instrumentation and vocals, a "less is more" approach of sorts. Fujishima's half-whisper/half-growl vocals make brief appearances throughout Transience's forty minutes. The guitars lack massive amounts of distortion, the drums are tempered. The album's empty spaces invokes melancholic thoughts.
Funeral Moth's second full-length is a nice change of pace from the standard Funeral Doom. It is always welcomed to hear a different approach to a genre and see another artist's perspective on what can be offered. Transience is an easy listen for all fans of Funeral Doom. You can check out more about Fujishima's Weird Truth Productions here and purchase the album while visiting the site.
