Review Summary: A funeral doom album that jumps ahead of the pack.
Making a good funeral doom album is not an easy task. This is a reasonably valid assumption seeing as the majority of funeral doom you will hear is rather poor. It's not a genre in which a band can produce a sub-standard album and get away with it; just sticking to the rules and emulating others doesn't do the trick either. What makes a really good funeral doom album, and I’m sure this goes for any genre, is having a sense of personality. When one can identify with an album, associate with it, pick it out from the rest, this is when that album has done what it set out to do. In regards to funeral doom, being ‘individual’ is rather hard; in a genre where variation doesn’t come about easily, and where its music is liable to falling into a tiresome monotone, only a fair few albums are able to make any sort of personal connection. Consummatum Est’s
Funeral Procession is one of them.
Comprising of only three very long tracks,
Funeral Procession is a very involving album. Meeting the criteria of ‘having a personality’, the album not only takes a long time to digest, but even longer to evaluate; it has much more below its surface than one might first suspect. What is perhaps
Funeral Procession’s strongest point is that it dares to be different. Obviously influenced by early Funeral, the album is directed by a female soprano vocalist, who does the majority of the vocals on the first two tracks and all of them on the third. What is beautiful about her voice though, is not because it is particularly good; rather, she puts her heart and soul into it, making it both delicate and fragile, yet invoking a sense of unwavering and raw emotional power. Alongside that, harsh vocals are also used, if only on the first two tracks. Fortunately for the album, they are used sparingly; they are no doubt good, but had they been overused, it would have hugely detracted from the sense of despair created by the operatic vocals. Not in accordance to most other funeral doom, the harsh vocals are not low gutturals, but heavily distorted screams and shrieks in a black metal vein. Better yet, ‘Ashes to Ashes, Dust to Dust’ features both vocalists in unison, which only adds to the album’s grandeur. Moreover,
Funeral Procession, for want of a better expression, puts the ‘funeral’ in ‘funeral doom’. Guitars play a very minimal role, drowned out by what makes Consummatum Est so unique, an organ. The lo-fi production coupled with the saturating effect of the organ creates a thick atmosphere that is both haunting and enveloping.
Funeral Procession is a special album, in the sense that you can attribute any number of feelings to it. It’s an album for those pensive moments, disquieting in its melancholy and wistful in its mood. A criminally overlooked funeral doom album,
Funeral Procession is a superb take on the genre, and an album that will you leave you speechless.
Immutable skies
Where stars don't shine
Here is my home
An abandoned place
Where I can rest
For an eternity and more...
