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!
Déhà is a very busy man. One look at his Metal Archives page will show you that he has his hands in a lot of different projects across a rather large scope of music. Delving into the list, a few of his projects stand out. The Belgian man has almost annually released music under the Black Metal moniker of Merda Mundi (Latin for "shit of the world"), for regular readers or fans of Funeral Doom, Déhà is also the man behind the instrumental/atmospheric Funeral Doom band, Slow. Today's focus, however, is on his Blackened Drone/Doom project, Yhdarl. Déhà, along with fellow musician, Larvalis, digitally released a new, two-song entitled A Prelude to the Great Loss.
The name of the EP is exactly what it might imply. A Prelude to the Great Loss will ultimately build to an album entitled Loss. It features the songs, "Unblessed Hands" and "Primal Disgrace", which were originally recorded in 2014 and feature a slew of guest appearances like Ascaris of Ævangelist and Old from Drohtnung. "Unblessed Hands" resonates more as a (relatively) prototypical Funeral Doom song. Throughout its roughly 12-minute runtime, the track has an undertow of somber guitar strings from which harsh shrieks and bellows occasionally break through. It is in the EP's latter track, "Primal Disgrace", where tides turn and tempos spike into blackened territories. Yhdarl's music becomes an exercise in crippling torment as the track progresses. The tempestuous Black Metal breaks momentarily to alone occasional doom or droning interludes before returning to a pummeling pace.
The two tracks dichotomize Yhdarl's music in a way that showcases Déhà's range (as if his plethora of projects did not prove that anyway). A Prelude to the Great Loss is a healthy dose of Extreme/Funeral Doom Metal that leaves you wanting more. One can only hope that Loss is delivered in the relative near future. For the time being, may I suggest diving headfirst into Déhà's daunting discography as well as purchasing today's feature from Yhdarl's Bandcamp page? A bit of an undertaking, but I promise it is worth the reward. Have a great weekend!
