It’s the weekend! What better way to get it started than with the inaugural installment of “Funeral Doom Fridays”. 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, my 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!
Fórn is a fairly recent, five-piece from Boston who specialize in a blackened, sludgy brand of funeral doom metal, siphoning inspirations from bands like Grief, Burning Witch, and Asunder. They burst onto the scene last year with their debut full-length LP, entitled The Departure of Consciousness. It served as a strong launching point for the band who formed in 2012 and proceeded to crush and bludgeon critics with the sheer heaviness of the album. In a new effort to follow up their pulverizing, full-length debut; they are releasing a new EP, Weltschmerz, which is due out on December 11th through Gilead Media/Eroding Wings. The album title is German for “a feeling of world-weariness”, and this four-track record certainly imposes a similar feeling that the title would suggest.
Weltschmerz is broken up into two, two-part songs, “Saudade” and “Dolor”. These tracks entwine airy melodies and reprieves with filthy guitar distortions and vitriolic growls. The former “Saudade” features more of the blackened sludge that makes Fórn a semblance of their fellow Bostonian inspiration, Grief, while the latter “Dolor” harkens more to the now-defunct Asunder; the funeral doom troupe from Oakland, California. The run-time on the EP does not eclipse twenty three minutes, making it a good sampling for the range Fórn covers in their music. You can stream the entire EP now through the band’s Bandcamp page as well as order the physical copy from Eroding Wings.
If you also wanted something else to check out, Fórn released a 7” split with Yautja recently that came out in some really awesome packaging. Plus, the split is a stellar dichotomy of metal styles as the doomy Fórn is coupled to the abrasive grindcore of Yautja.
