FUNERAL – Gospel Of Bones

vote
7.5

• Bands:
  FUNERAL
• Duration: 01:06:26
• Available from: 10/18/2024
• Label:

• Season Of Mist

Streaming not yet available

Funeral's career must not have been simple: a funeral doom/death metal band born in the land of black metal precisely in the years in which it was thriving, a list of former members as long as a grocery receipt, two musicians tragically lost during the journey (bassist Einar André Fredriksen by suicide in 2003 and guitarist Christian Loos by overdose in 2006), labels that dump them in the space of an amen, other personal vicissitudes spread over thirty years of music, celebrated with a celebratory concert in Oslo in April 2022. Anyone, without boundless passion, would have given up.
Yet Anders Eek, drummer and historic leader of the band since the first days of life, has never given up and, despite a nine-year break between “Oratorium” in 2012 and the latest “Praesentialis In Aeternum”, he is still here to offer us his sad and fatalistic melodies and, indeed, this time he even wants to relaunch, telling the misfortunes he has gone through in a single album: with “Gospel Of Bones”, in fact, the Norwegian artist intends to translate all the feelings (obviously negative) that he has gone through in his life.
It seems that the album was, if not written, at least conceived almost simultaneously with the previous one, but the lineup changes are as usual numerous and in particular the replacement of Sindre Nedland with the baritone opera singer Eirik P. Krokfjord should be noted , specialized in interpretations of Wagner, and the entry of the violinist Ingvild Johannessen, who brought with her her baggage of traditional Norwegian instruments.
“Gospel Of Bones”, in light of this chain of events, continues in the mood between gothic and classic of its predecessor and indeed accentuates it, with measured excursions into the funeral doom/death metal of the origins, but the new additions, in addition to a long sequence of guests (among them Michael Gira of Swans and the soprano Kari Ulfsnes Kleiven), also bring with them folk impulses that were not so strong before.
The result is nine songs, all very long except the short dirge “Alio's Lullaby”, which narrate, without any filter, a life made up of suffering, losses, misery; a sort of autobiography in stages that throws in our faces all the pain suffered by its protagonist and does so with a musical language that, mixing all the ingredients, moves between the dramatic and the grotesque.
At times it seems that the theatricality of “La Masquerade Infernale” by Arcturus is revised in an even darker and baroque version, starting from a substratum that includes the doom of Candlemass and classical music instead of black metal. The fairytale tragedy of “Too Young To Die”, the massive riffs of “Procession Of Misery”, the black solemnity of the choruses of “These Rusty Nails”: everything is over the top but in a positive way, as if all the details – and there are many here – they were necessary for the composition of these hymns to the deepest torment.
In a project of this kind, not easy to tackle due to its length and bombast, it will be physiological that each listener, subjectively, may consider some passages boring or superfluous, but it is undeniable that such an album can only be born from a great ambition and that the good Eek won the bet.