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Asunder > Works Will Come Undone > Reviews > MutantClannfear
Asunder - Works Will Come Undone

Slow, Deep and Hard - 78%

MutantClannfear, February 7th, 2011

I will be frank: this album was my very first venture into funeral doom metal. I have heard many words by people mystified and shocked by this strange genre, yet I have heard very little detail as to what actually constitutes a funeral doom song. Thus, I decided to make a bit of original research, and look into Asunder, a band I had heard associated with the genre quite a bit. After listening to this album, I can assure the reader of four things about Asunder, and in effect, funeral doom metal:

1. It's an extremely slow genre of music. At the most, there's two points in Asunder's 80-minute epic when the tempo rises above 100 beats per minute. It's not drone/doom-slow, but it's far slower than any other genre of music you'll come across.
2. At its core, it's essentially death/doom metal on barbituates.
3. It's best buddies with dark ambient and other atmospheric genres, so expect a lot of both throughout the music's length.
4. Despite its ridiculous length, it is through some magical force able to captivate the listener as it slowly drags itself along through massive song lengths.

That's not to say this release is perfect, but it's far from terrible. Asunder seem to be perfectly stylized for the type of music they desire to play. And although there is a 20-minute blunder that severely hurts the album as a whole, it's altogether a worthwhile experience.

Compared to many drone bands with similar-length songs, Asunder have composed a relatively large amount of riffs at their disposal, and though the music does tend to repeat its riffs often, it's constantly adding ambient and atmospheric background elements to keep the experience from going dry before the band decides to change gear. The riffs range from mournful acoustics to droning, imposing behemoths that sound like a deathgrind band slowed down to subsonic levels, and they never fail in evoking some sort of feeling from your mind. The riffs never try to go for anything that sounds "cool" in the conventional sense of the word; most of them are focused on creating the vastest, most scenic landscape as possible inside your mind. Be it a cold winter daybreak or a Chinese forest's misty dusk, the album basically always has some imagery in your mind. And that's always going to get you bonus points from me - when music expands beyond the sense of hearing and affects your sense of sight (if only sight), your band is obviously doing something right. Despite all this mental image evocation mumbo-jumbo, the riffs are musically pleasing as well; with the ambience and rhythm guitars to back the lead guitar up, every single riff is chock-full of entertaining, calming melody. For riffs that are at best 80 beats per minute, the guitarists have more than done their part in keeping the music immersive. The drummer is doing a fine job as well. Of course, he's not doing anything amazing or worth special notice, but when you're going for a slow, mournful tone reminiscent of a funeral march, creating technical fills to show off your drumming skills obviously isn't going to help the music in any way. He makes felicitous use of the cymbals, which are more essential to the beat of this style of music than any other element.

There is an equal use of singing and growling on this album. Well, it's not exactly singing - more like melodic chanting, similar to that of a funeral march (duh). While the chants are near-perfect in their execution - almost always serving as a complement to the lead melody as opposed to taking center stage - the growls could use a bit of work. While they are vehement and strong, they're not often deep enough and their tone feels hoarse and raspy.

Remember that blunder I mentioned earlier? Well, it turns out that Asunder has decided to play a little trick on their listeners. Those who see the length of the second and last track on Works Will Come Undone, "Rite of Finality", would most likely be surprised to see it's over 50 minutes in length. Well, for those of you preparing to listen to the album that are throwing a brouhaha because they're expecting to listen to some epic near-hour-long atmospheric mammoth of a song - well, I hate to be a killjoy, but you may leave your excitement at the door, as you'll find with much disappointment, just like I did, that over half of the length of "Rite of Finality" is a bunch of crappy ambient, making the track only minutes longer than "A Famine". I remember listening to it the first time, sitting there at the beginning of the ambient nonsense, waiting for the epic doom portion of Asunder's music to return with a thunderous force...And it never did. Asunder's story, their final album and the one that they'll be remembered by forever, concludes with a bunch of lackluster atmospheric bullshit. Now, I could have stood thirty seconds of it - hell, I would be fine with two minutes of it. But twenty minutes of it? And it's not even good ambient, for God's sake. Okay, if you've ever been around any opponents of Sunn O)))'s music, I'm sure you've heard their classic argument - "it sounds like a refrigerator". Well, I disagree; Sunn O)))'s music sure has a lot of melody and rhythm, and I've never heard any sort of musical refrigerator. But guess what, folks - this faux ambient actually does sound like a refrigerator! Sure, throughout the crappy ambient, every few seconds you get some weird shuffling noise, for a few minutes you get what sounds like E.T. reading his daily verse out of his copy of the Holy Xopiw, and you also get some guest vocals by some constantly depressed alien race whose beings eat testosterone implants for breakfast. But all in all, it can't do anything to redeem the last half of the song. For all intents and purposes, the song "Rite of Finality" is 27 minutes long, unless you have an affinity for repetitive, boring ambience.

"A Famine" is the darker of the two tracks, having a much more ominous tone than "Rite of Finality", but I will give the latter its dues - it certainly inspires much more imagery and imagination. They are both great tracks, so check them both out. One last flaw I feel I must point out, though - the music has a strange quality of leaving your mind as soon as it's over. You can recall the entire song by memory while it's playing, but pause it and try to remember any of it. It's near fucking impossible. I guess you can think of it as an analogy: Asunder's music is actually a date rapist who drugs you with roofies and date rapes you with its wonderful qualities, but then you wake up and can't remember it happened at all.

Flaws aside, this is a very worthwhile release and I'll certainly be returning to the world of funeral doom metal sometime soon. Though not for those with attention deficit disorder, Works Will Come Undone is a great release and should not be ignored.