Review Summary: Some in Funeral for a Friend consider this their best album. They might be right.
"Funnily enough, there are some of us in the band who consider this the best album we ever released."
Funeral for a Friend were always self-aware, and even though they headlined their biggest shows after releasing Tales Don't Tell Themselves, they knew that everything post-Hours struggled to make a cultural impact. Into Oblivion kept them afloat, but fourth album Memory & Humanity came and went without fanfare. Their fanbase was loyal, but from then on, it was stagnant.
They're an example of what being part of a scene can do for a band, and what happens when you leave it behind. They could have kept up what they started, fully fringed and emotive, lyrics designed to be spray painted on MySpace pages. Instead, they incorporated metallic riffs, dabbled with progressive rock storytelling, and jumped from genre to genre with each passing release. By staying true to themselves, they turned their backs on a devoted scene, with no new audience in mind.
But they might be right. Welcome Home Armageddon - which was eventually certified silver in the UK - was a complete 180 from Memory & Humanity's introspective rock. This is a record propelled by fire and musical proficiency, where Matt Davies' impassioned vocal melodies dance over some seriously furious instrumentation. It looked to Recovery and The End of Nothing from Hours and made a whole album's worth of these loud and energetic anthems, for the first time in their careers making more noise than what had come before.
Inspired by a friend who thought the planet would benefit from our extinction, Davies penned songs about lives fully aware of death's looming influence. Damned If You Do, Dead If You Don't's urgency is echoed in its lyrics as people try to make sense of love and disaster before we celebrate the end. Album centrepiece Spinning Over the Island is a battle between youthful optimism and everything that gets in the way, with its harrowing "we grow old, never learn from our mistakes" chorus, followed by talk of losing hope and racing towards the finish line.
The band never sounded tighter than here. It's in the way seemingly out-of-control guitar licks resolve themselves perfectly, and in how drum patterns are attuned so precisely to the stresses in riffs. That it packs in so many ideas, keeps them coherent, and never sacrifices strong songwriting for self-indulgence makes for a downright satisfying record. Aftertaste in particular is full of these moments, from the wee gallops in each verse to the descending accompaniments in the choruses which land gracefully before the next line packs another punch.
Now almost ten years old, its title track's warm greeting towards armageddon, treating it like an old friend, sounds as timely as ever. "See the world outside, beauty in the fire" may well be coronavirus, it might be Twitter, it could be the climate disaster. It's a song that's seen two more Funeral for a Friend albums and the band come to an end, yet it sounds as exciting and as accomplished as the day it was released, as with the rest of Welcome Home Armageddon. This is the band firing on all cylinders, at a point in their career where they had settled into a groove, felt they had nothing to prove, but proved they deserved more than they got anyway.
