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!
Some of what makes Funeral Doom so evocative is the poetry the music can inherently possess. The artistry stems from the words uttered by a vocalist, by the strings plucked and cymbals crashed in somber rhythm. For the Freiburg, Germany-based Lone Wanderer, this poetry is wonderfully composed on their first full-length album, The Majesty of Loss. This four-song effort saw its release last Friday and follows an EP entitled Principles that was released in the fall of 2014.
Lone Wanderer's music treads a path similar to fellow Germans, Ahab, and the Aussie legends, Mournful Congregation. Their patterns are calculated and carried out at a near-standstill pace with great patience and precision. Guttural bellows and spoken word from Chris Hoen and Bruno Schotten present duality in vocal arrangements. Their verses speak to woe and grief. This is exemplified well in "Noumenon",
The aim of all bleakest misery
Is to embrace the sanctity of being
The aim of all bleakest misery
Is to embrace the negativity of being
It is seen yet again in the title track,
And this sorrow-stricken world
Shall be our putrid grave
For mostly, it is loss which teaches
Us about the worth of things
These words seem to hit deeper when carried by Hoen and Schotten's towering guitars and Simon Brooker's low-end wizardry on bass. Jakob Zeblin's work on drums compliments Brooker's bass with perfect metered schemes that keep Lone Wanderer's music chained to the Earth. Their collective arrangements create a dense and textured display of art and literature that can be listened to repeatedly without a loss of interest.
Take a listen to The Majesty of Loss and see the poetry for yourself. Physical and digital copies of the album are available for purchase through Lone Wanderer's Bandcamp page if you found this album to be as enjoyable as I did. I will be taking next week off to celebrate Thanksgiving and to compile a list of the best Funeral Doom albums of the year which will be unveiled at the beginning of December.
