A Funeral Show

It's just my luck to discover Deinos Mastema the other day, only to find that Wintersieg is ending this project so he can concentrate on a new black metal project (Etat Limite). As far as I can tell, "A Funeral Show", Deinos Mastema's swansong work, is the same work as "The Forgotten Plain" with the same songs in the same order as on that album, self-released back in 2015, but remixed anew and repackaged with a new album title - and new artwork which will probably excite a lot of interest for the wrong reason, featuring as it does a skeleton looking like it's taking a selfie!

From start to finish, the album is sheer blasting black metal fury with a barrage of dark dissonant tremolo guitar chords, pounding percussion, ambient sighing synths in the far background and a venomous death-rattle vocal that sometimes has to fight the music just to be heard. In some ways the music is a bit reminiscent of Deathspell Omega's style: the vocals sometimes have that laidback, slavering style that relishes every horrific tone they utter, the atmosphere is dark and bleak, and the songs are packed with few moments to spare. Any spaces that appear, that allow the black emptiness to intrude, simply happen to be pauses between songs.

An early track highlight turns out to be the title song with heavy chunky riffs that anchor and support the music, a better balance of guitar and synths in the mix (meaning that the synths can definitely be heard!) and a confident vocal. After this track, songs start to sound a bit more headbanger-friendly with clear angular riffing and start to zip from one scenario of melodic BM to ambient brooding, choral singing or something completely different in the space of a few minutes. Middle track "Colorless World" brings some melancholy with a slower pace before the album returns to a melodic riff-heavy BM style. "The Abomination" is quite a distinctive track with spiky riffing and shrill lead guitar melodies that lead into an unexpected instrumental section of undulating guitar noise and a sorrowing chorus.

While it's solid in its song-writing, musicianship and production, the album might be just too dense and layered for individual songs to stand out. Differences are in the details of songs so you need to listen to them closely and over the course of nine songs stretching to nearly 50 minutes, that can be tedious. With every track in aggressive full-on attack mode, the level of intensity turns out to be much the same over the entire album so there is not a sense of songs building up emotion to a climax at the end. The music's sonic range is limited to guitars, synth, vocals and percussion, and with the exception of the guitars, these elements don't vary much.

With "A Funeral Show" definitively closing a chapter in Wintersieg's development as a BM musician, we can hope that Etat Limite and other future BM projects will allow him to find opportunities that'll stretch his abilities as a musician, song-writer, engineer and producer much further.