Metal Storm logo
Funerary - Starless Aeon review




Bandcamp music player
Reviewer:
N/A

2 users:
7
Band: Funerary
Album: Starless Aeon
Release date: August 2014


01. Coerced Creation
02. Untitled
03. Beneath The Black Veil
04. Starless Aeon
05. Depressor

How the hell do you judge an album like this? It's so good, yet simultaneously flat and deflated. Welcome to Starless Aeon... an album of amazing atmosphere built through cavernous production, yet somehow is just irritatingly substance-less.

Starless Aeon is strikingly similar to playing drunk billiards: You could have all the perfect shots lined up to really clean house, trick the ladies at the bar into thinking you're cool, and win some money...but somehow you come up frustratingly short and wind up home alone with an empty wallet and vomit on your shoes. Funerary have an ear for atmosphere, they've built that up amazingly. Everything from guitar tones and effects to layering and production is thoughtfully put together. The guitars have just the right dash heaping of distortion, the vocals are disgusting underlying screams and grunts drifting through the background, topped off with those haunting sustained tones cutting in and out of the mix.

Yes, Starless Aeon is a beautifully hideous sludge-doom beast that hits all the right spots...Yet somehow the whole thing falls a little flat in a lot of places. There's no sense of progression from song to song, no climax's, no real sense of purpose to a good majority of the album. Both "Untitled" and the title track are the pinnacle of filthy, dark atmosphere and ambiance, but it's not until the final track "Depressor" that everything comes together cohesively. As good as Starless Aeon is for each of its individual components, the fact that you don't get a full sense of what's going on until the final track is what keeps it from being anything truly interesting.

Sludge/doom fans should certainly give this one a shot. While it certainly does lack direction, at the very least it should make fantastic background music.





Written on 30.07.2014 by Former EIC. Now just a reviewer guy.


Comments

Comments: 3   Visited by: 77 users
31.07.2014 - 02:25
Troy Killjoy
perfunctionist
Even with the negatives, you still made me want to listen to this. Or maybe it's just the artwork. Not sure.

Either way, this one will get some of my attention, and soon.
----
"Wise men talk because they have something to say; fools because they have to say something."
Loading...
31.07.2014 - 02:50
Rating: 7
Doc G.
Full Grown Hoser
Written by Troy Killjoy on 31.07.2014 at 02:25

Even with the negatives, you still made me want to listen to this. Or maybe it's just the artwork. Not sure.

Either way, this one will get some of my attention, and soon.

Like I said - well worth checking out. Just a little deflated I find.
----
"I got a lot of really good ideas, problem is, most of them suck."
- George Carlin
Loading...
31.07.2014 - 16:54
Kuroboshi

Same here, really peaked my (careful) interest. Let's hope the negatives make me enjoy the album.
Loading...

Hits total: 3415 | This month: 7