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!
2015 featured a handful of great extreme Doom metal albums. Bell Witch released a monolithic arrangement in Four Phantoms, genre titans, Ahab and Skepticism, returned to release new music, and among those were other outstanding examples of glacially-paced onslaughts. One of these outstanding examples came by way of the English solo project named Ethereal Shroud. Joe Hawker has operated under this guise since 2013, crafting compositions of Funeral Doom laced with depressive Black Metal. In 2013, Hawker released Ethereal Shroud's debut demo, called Absolution | Emptiness. Then roughly 15 months later, in the dying days of February, followed it with a proper full-length, They Became the Falling Ash.
Maybe it is because of personal preference, but the combination of atmospheric or depressive Black Metal and Funeral Doom is utterly mesmerizing. Two genres that convey a similar emotional state through metallic, polar opposites are bound together in striking dichotomy. Hawker understands this marriage. He mediates it wonderfully. Through the course of an hour, Ethereal Shroud becomes an homage to emptiness. Each of the three tracks are towering, gelid obelisks of blast beats and tremolo that crumble into atmospheric and ambient lulls only to rebuild themselves stronger and more powerful each time. Joe's hisses and shrieks seep and soar with dejection. On "Desperation Hymn", he cynically proclaims "Kingdom never comes, your will is never done / May sulphur blacken your wicked lungs, breath deeply…" These lyrical themes, accompanied by a burgeoning depression, run amok through They Became the Falling Ash.
Digital versions of the album are currently available for purchase and there is a vinyl option in the works according to Ethereal Shroud's Facebook page (an internet search has proven we haven't missed it yet). This will be a great opportunity to get your hands on a physical copy of one of last year's best extreme Doom albums. Unfortunately, it appears CD and cassette formats have sold out. Nevertheless, They Became the Falling Ash most definitely warrants the money. Check out the album below and explore Hawker's other works through Ethereal Shroud's Bandcamp page.
