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!
For this week's feature, I thought it would be worth the time to share with you all an early project that features members of some underground metal's biggest talents over the past handful of years. Merkstave was a project born in 2005 by M.S.W. (Hell, Mizmor (live), and Elu of the Nine), Paul Riedl (Blood Incantation, Spectral Voice, Elu of the Nine), Kyle Watson (Mania), and Matt Ayers. In its six years of life, the droning Funeral Doom outfit released two momentous demos that solidified their status as an extreme doom power amongst the genre's biggest fans. The two demos were released in 2011 and repackaged in 2013 as a "self titled album" (the artwork from that album is featured above.)
The group's first demo, Lament for Lost Gods, saw its release in March of 2011 and featured two rehearsals of the eponymous track, one in the Winter of 2011 and one in the Winter of 2010. The second demo, named Spawn of A Lower Star, came out a few months later in June. In its repackaging, the first demo was trimmed and renamed "Lament for Lost Gods (Pt. 1)" and "Lament for Lost Gods (Pt. 2)". The first track begins with a slow, creeping drone before Paul and Kyle's vocals emerge over a (relatively) mid-paced beat. By the ninth minute, Hell breaks loose. Cosmic storms of drums and crashes erupt from the mixing. Shrieking, tormented vocals inject a fine amount of terror. These Death Doom moments run along a thread of dissonant drone that weaves Merkstave its own banner in Funeral Doom. This anguished wave continues throughout the following thirty minutes as if the genre's greatest predecessors were fused with Sunn-like drone.
Many bands claim drone as a part of their arsenal, but Merkstave shows it. These three tracks are effortlessly complimented by moments of satisfying drone, done mainly by Hell main man, M.S.W. These moments fall in between frenetic outbursts, like seen in "Lament of the Gods (Pt. 2)" and "Spawn of A Lower Star". Overall, the demos do everything well when it comes to Funeral Doom. It is those extra nuances and influences that set music, like Merkstave, ahead of the rest of the pack. Check out the repackaged demos below and if you like what you have heard, there are vinyl copies available through Pesanta Urfolk/Vale of Tears. Have a great weekend!
