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!
Music has the ability to channel a range of mental and emotional states. Anger, sadness, joy, and excitement are usually covered by just about any particular type of music. However, Heavy Metal has an uncanny knack to tap into other more complex states. Thanks to some of the genre's deepest recesses like Funeral Doom, Heavy Metal can make a listener feel uneasy or fearful. Anxiety and terror can seep from speakers into the mind. It is something that draws myself personally to Funeral Doom Metal (and a handful of other Metal genres). It is why I was drawn to this week's feature, Wreck of the Hesperus.
From the first listen of the Irish band's third, full-length album, Sediment, a wave of anxiousness seemed to slowly crawl out from the headphones as dread and discomfort filled the room. The two-song album runs a staggering 44 minutes, with every moment as agitated and tense as the last. The album's first song, "Erosion (Death's White Lustre) gifts listeners with a searing wave of sludge-infused funerary tempos. A slithering display of dissonant anti-music that quells all hope of release or solace. This ominous trend continues in the 23-minute excursion, "All Life in Death (Sediment)". The second track's most striking feature is the inclusion of the female vocals at the beginning of the procession. The song then breaks into a similar pace as the former track, causing the Earth to crumble away and chasms to open in the planet's very foundation.
Sediment is suffocating slab of sonic matter and can be tough to process if one is ill-prepared. Nevertheless, Wreck of the Hesperus allows a listener to explore anxious feelings amongst the sewage and sludge that riddle their Funeral Doom Metal. They have been making this destructive dirge since 2004 and continue to instill anxiety almost annually. Check out and purchase their album through Bandcamp now and like the band on Facebook.
