Incanation, Autopsy, Obituary… ring a bell? This is old school doomish death metal played by true veterans…. Not just some worshipping wannabe-kids… no, this is not a re-enactment, fuck that! This is not Fun‘RUs this is fucking Funerus!
In works since 2003’s debut album Festering Earth, expectations are high for this years’ Reduced to Sludge. Awesome? Oh yes! Surpassing the previous album by a country mile, this album was an ambiguous animal for me as a listener. This is quite weird really as it follows the exact old death metal formulas. In fact, I almost wrote off this album at first, judging it to be boring piece of worthless garbage. How wrong I was! What a ridiculous thing to conclude as a can of slow death metal! There’s definitely something here!
One has to understand that this is music played by true veterans in the same way as they did all those years ago when the world (of metal) was new, and it is that very same touch inherent in Reduced to Sludge. This has its disadvantages as well, of course. There are no riffs that really stick to your head, the vocal-patterns, even though absolutely crushing and at the right place at the right time, don’t offer anything new. But what essentially elevates this over younger bands, is that it is purely genuine… and that is also its edge.
The old-school sound also adds to the whole. The album was mixed and mastered by Dan Swano (Dissection, Hail Of Bullets). The artwork was conjured by Dusty Peterson and it goes superbly with the album title and the atmosphere of the whole thing.
So what we have here is an excellent (true) old school release… no bs re-enactment (of which we have way too many nowadays!). If a fan of the old material of the bands listed above, then I’d definitely pick this up.
http://funerus.com
Miika Virtanen
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