Everything you touch, falls into pieces. Your life is becoming an immense cesspool of misery and despair. Well, to stop you from becoming a raging madman, slaughtering innocent people on a busy shopping street, here's an album to guide you on your journey through all your daily woes. It will not make you any happier but at least now you have a perfect soundtrack for these days.
Funerary is a band from Phoenix, AZ (USA) and a rising star in the American doom metal scene. Since their inception in early 2013, they have been a monolithic steamroller, slowly devouring the competition by blending doom, sludge, post-metal and drone or black ambient into a distinct own, hellish sound. Every extreme metal fan should get a hand on a copy because 'Starless Aeon' is a brutal, crushing masterpiece, breathing a bleak atmosphere of eternal dismay.
There's five songs on this album with 'Beneath the Black Veil' and 'Depressor' as the long sludge/doom anthems and the other as downright punishing pieces of extremely sluggish metal. Opener 'Coerced Creation' is an intense and immensy heavy, slow track with colossal guitars and both screams and growls.
Influences from bands like Sun O))), Yob, Conan, Nootgrush, Evoken or Corrupted are never far away. Like almost all of the songs on this album, 'Coerced Creation' seems to drag itself on tentacles of adversity and desperation. From the very beginning of this album a thick, black mist rolls through my speakers. But that might just be my imagination.
Title track 'Starless Aeon' differs from the other songs by being a nice piece of drone ambient, functioning both as a breather and an intro for the final ten minutes of downtuned punishment in 'Depressor'. 'Atonement' can also be described as a drone track but features some deep, guttural vocals of impending annihilation.
So in all, this is an excellent piece of doom metal which every fan of extreme slow music should have in his collection. It's as simple as that. Doom metal is far from death, it constantly renews itself with brilliant bands like Funerary. It's bands like these that make me so happy I started this website...
Serge