For the last three years I've been trying to think of a single reason why this album doesn't top Incantation, Convulse, Adramelech, Abhorrence, or any of the other death metal masters of old which I adore, and after hundreds of listens it has finally dawned on me that it is a fruitless effort. This is absolutely superb, and no real complaint can be leveled against it, honestly, if you asked me to pinpoint where I removed the one percentage point from my score, I couldn't come up with a reason better than Nex Monumentum should have been the album closer since I like it when albums close on a long, epic number. I'm not even sure if that counts as something worth taking a point off for though, since Among The Exiled is still a beast of a track. So, what makes these guys so brilliant? My best justification is that they are old school, yet not primitive. This is OSDM reinvented for the modern age, and I feel no doubt in calling this a modern day classic.
Obviously, Funebrarum are a member of the new OSDM movement, and as such they're made up of pretty much entirely old fashioned parts, the guitar tone is dense and crunchy with a fairly sharp edge when they go into attack mode, it's not nearly as muddy as most old acts or modern ones following their paths, and when you consider that Beneath the Columns of Abandoned Gods was just about the muddiest, most bottomed out recording ever made it is quite a shock. The riffs are mostly made up of tremolos, Finndeath leads and chunky pounding riffs, with no shredding or dissonant jangling as per the modern ideals, the songs are composed with a recurring mix of fast, blasted parts, and slower passages, with vocals that exist mostly in a hoarse roar. All of these nuts and bolts have all been in the framework of death metal for over twenty years, The Sleep of Morbid Dreams simply oils every moving part and paints everything visible with a new sheen to make it into a wholly reborn beast.
The music on offer here is more or less a combination of Abhorrence's crazed tremolo riffing, Convulse's pummeling grooves, and Adramelech's lovely jangly melodies, and to avoid being purely Finnish worship it is all delivered in a straight forward American style of sheer violence and brutality. If that combination of ideas doesn't excite you, you're dead inside. Not only is it influenced by awesome music, it's also unique; no other bands in this retro death metal scene, or hell, no other bands in the genuine article have this sort of mash up of half a Finland's wildly varying styles, all jammed through an American brutality filter. There's basically no Incantation in it either, obviously, there are people who see any band who has tremolo riffs, an old school sound, and a fast meets slower style as being exactly the same as Incantation, but those people are morons. There's no real doom here, the slow is pretty much all pummeling Convulse riffs with a fancy new sharp as hell guitar tone, it's heavy, brutish and groovy, but not doomy. The sound is clear, with a pretty good focus on note differentiation, rather than a muddy wall of evil, the vocals are more hoarse and roared than simply growled from the bowels of hell, and most damning is the riffing style of tremolos. Incantation primarily used crawling, twisted and evil tremolo riffs that were usually not all that busy, usually playing around with atonality when they did go for the more active styles, the tremolos here are more technical, featuring frequent melodic shifts all over the fretboard and carefully timed bursts of higher pitched sharper flurries, with practically no moments of evil churning away on one or two notes in a creepy fashion. This is exactly like what Abhorrence did with theirs, this is just performed a bit cleaner and much more aggressively.
What's more, not only are the riffs fresh and exciting, they're also easily differentiated from one another. They're constructed so carefully that no riffs seem to be filler, and the busy frantic picking manages to use the same general approaches and ideas, while never sounding to identical to the other riffs that surround it. The grooving riffs also can be hooky, or just plain heavy, or they can be a companion to some twisted lead work, or they can be dark and ominous, there are no worries about the riffing ideas feeling stale or too similar to one another.
The songs utilise the wide range of excellent riffs on offer here very well, headbanging grooves are frequently offset by magnificent melodic leads or intense, high tempo blasted tremolo riffs. And I mean intense, the massive production here, and the outstanding riffs themselves make these uptempo riff shifts jump out at you with a fury you won't find outside of Disciples of Mockery. All the style transitions are large enough to make you shut up and take notice, yet smooth enough to feel like logical developments, the composition skills here are absolutely perfect.
Speaking of absolutely perfect, Shawn Eldridge may very well be the best straight up death metal drummer in the world. While in the many opportunities he's given to show it, he does show himself to be a very, very fast drummer, both in sheer high speed endurance blasts and in hectic all over the kit bashings, I'm not sure if he's got the insane tech death drummer skills, but when it comes to actually writing drumming for genuine, mean and badass death metal, he's on a whole different level to anyone else I've heard. Eldridge injects every groove with little touches and unexpected flairs that really make the already great riffs rise above and beyond. It can be just an extra symbol here, and quick double or triple tap on the snare where a single would usually be used, it's fantastic, unintrusive, fitting, yet exciting and volatile all at once. Then you've got him when he speeds up, not only is he fast as all hell, he's inventive. His kit does lose the kick drums a little at the higher tempos, which I feel is a perfectly fine trade to avoid some obnoxious triggering, but he makes up for it with overwhelming snare hit speed and frenzied symbol bashing. The way he moves around his crash during the blast beats is absolutely wonderful, allowing him to get all the impressive variation of a fill while not letting up on intense blasts or grind beats. This is truly one of the best drumming performances ever recorded on a regular death metal album.
With guitar work and drumming as brilliant as this, the album would be excellent at any rate, but Daryl Kahan and Dave Wagner add the final touches on this masterpiece. Kahan's voice isn't as low as on the debut, instead, delivering a higher pitched, throatier roar, it sounds a little bit tinkered with, but still very good. He varies his tempo and enunciation quite frequently, and the general unusual nature of it helps him stay sounding interesting throughout. In addition to this, he's got a couple of high pitched screams, but much less than you would expect someone who has done vocals for a black metal band, as well as a few times where he seems to scream so hard that it seems to break the very microphone itself, such as the "Tortured forever" part of Cursed Eternity, and it sounds utterly badass. Dave Wagner's bass is impressive in that it not only manages to be audible among the chaos, but manages to fight it's way to actually being imposing in it's own right. In addition to adding meat to back up the cool Finndeath leads, destructive bass hits are used to emphasize some of the violent hyper speed riffs too on tracks like Grave Reaper.
Funebrarum's second full length album is a true master work, taking everything that ruled about the death metal bands of old, and boosting the violence and technicality to modern levels, and takes the old school production and tinkers with it until it's as furious as the music. It's got amazing riffs, amazing drums, amazing vocals, amazing bass, the songs are put together exquisitely and it's inventive, there is not a single area where this album can be picked apart, I've tried to find it for three years, and it simply doesn't exist, this is as good as anything any band has put out regardless of time frame.
