Ea Taesse

This band and Ahab seem to be the two main funeral doom fans to gather a following of people who otherwise don't listen to funeral doom- both are bands with dumb gimmicks and aesthetics. Coincidence? Doubtful- a lot of funeral doom sucks but I think the only reason Ea got noticed amongst the pack of similar bands is due to the whole 'ancient dead language' and 'anonymous members' and 'boring, derivative music' thing. Ea is just below Remembrance as the band which manages to make the most stereotypical, silly funeral doom ever- this nearly makes Hierophant look like Thergothon. It's slow. It's growly. We get it. Goddamn Russians.

Ea is one of those epic, kind of romantic funeral doom bands in the Remembrance vein- giant, held chords, choral setting on the keyboard basically always on, low, whispery growls for vocals- the usual. None of these elements are bad in and of themselves but they're used in exactly the same way nearly every band in this style uses them. Create an arduously long song through minor variations on simple themes, and make the structure so long and the music so slow that the listener hopefully doesn't remember when the exact same section is copy/pasted later in the song. Neat! Everyone can make funeral doom now! Creative, narrative structuring like you'd find in a Skepticism song is for NERDS.

The one weird part of this album would be the drum programming, which is really erratic and oddly timed, and not necessarily in a good way. This is actually an album where a more conventional 'slow rock beat' style of programming would be to the release's benefit, because listening to these big, epic chords and winding leads clashes with the octopus drumming underneath. There's very few 'normal' beats, which is a credit to the band's creativity at least, but it really just sounds like someone fell asleep on a drum machine and just put it under the rest of the music. Random cymbals chime every which way, really slow syncopation robs the riffs of the simple, blunt force they could have with a more straightforward style of rhythm- I don't know, it's weird.

More importantly, it's pretty obvious that the band just isn't that creative. Take the opening track 'Laeleia' (which I've heard probably five times as many times as any other track because trundling through the whole album is such an endurance test I can rarely manage it); it opens with a pretty neat four or five minutes of winding, shifting funeral doom, but has no one else noticed the audible CLUNK that drops in when the vocals are incorporated? The guy (or guys, but probably guy) behind this clearly has no idea how to incorporate vocals into the more complex structures, so instead of finding a way, the band just reverts to funeral doom 101 tropes musically because god damnit he's been practicing his whispergrowls so long they're not going to go to waste now! The instrumental passages of this record are by far the most interesting and the band would probably be served by just eschewing the vocals altogether if they're going to damage the structuring that much.

It isn't really overtly bad (and really, what funeral doom is), just boring and arduous and uncreative and not deserving of half the praise it's getting. Also the band's name is stupid and impossible to Google which makes me mad at them.