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!
Funeral Doom Friday sets its sights on Ukraine this week. Sorrowful Land is a one-man project from the city of Kharkov that was founded back in the spring of 2014. Initially, a duo of musicians, Max Molodtsov and Peter Laustsen worked together to release a demo track later that year. That track, "On Another's Sorrow", would be the only product of the duo's efforts. Laustsen left Sorrowful Land in the early months of this year, leaving Molodtsov to construct the band's music on his own. The results of his efforts have culminated in today's feature, Of Ruins… The debut full-length album saw its release this week through Solitude Productions.
No Clean Singing premiered and reviewed the album last week, providing a wonderful analysis about Of Ruins… In an effort to heap additional praise onto the album, Molodtsov's channeling of current and former funerary greats is top-notch. Take this understood precedence of greatness and combine it with his work in gothic doom band, Edenian, and lyrical content built out 19th-century English poetry, and the end result is a wonderfully evocative piece of Atmospheric/Funeral Doom Metal. Comparisons have been drawn to Finnish legends Skepticism as well as Shape of Despair, but much can be said of a link between Of Ruins… and the music of United Kingdom greats, Esoteric.
Parallels exist between vocal styling and guitar melodies when comparing Sorrowful Land to the English titans. Molodstov and Esoteric's Greg Chandler employ similar bellows. As for the guitar melodies, they evolve into punishing walls of lament. The former demo track, "On Another's Sorrow" as well as the title track and album closer, "Echoes of Endless Silence" are all solid showcases for this. Molodstov's appreciation of the inherent balance within Funeral Doom is strongest in his guitars. The threnody that radiates from sullen, stringed ambiance and the towering riffs come from the same stringed instruments and recesses of Max's mind.
It is a late edition to the discussion for 2016's best examples of Funeral Doom, but it pleads a worthy case. Check out the album below. For those that are interested, digital copies of Sorrowful Land's debut album are available through the project's Bandcamp page ($4.99) while physical copies are available through Solitude Productions ($10.) Make sure to follow Sorrowful Land on Facebook as well for all of Max's major updates and Solitude Productions' Facebook for similar releases from the past or in the future! Feel free to comment with your thoughts and future column suggestions at the bottom.
