Funeral Prophecy

Funestia is a one-man suicidal/depressive black metal project from France, active since 2002 but having released only a total of five songs so far, four of them being represented on this "Funeral Prophecy" demo. Asvarath, the creator of Funestia, thus presents to us a canonical suicidal/depressive black metal demo, with all the usual characteristics: tremolo picking, low, harsh and distorted vocals, fast drum machine and melancholic melodies that repeat themselves throughout the songs.

The first track, Damnation, is indeed a song of that kind, not that original but still enjoyable; Asvarath's vocals, in particular, are pretty good, although in his screams and shrieks he does not drift away that much from the vocal style of black metal singers such as the first Burzum, Darkthrone's Nocturno Culto etc.. The song itself has some breaks and changes of rhythm (plus an interesting slow outro made up by a slow distorted guitar), and on the whole it's a good start. In the second one, Under Endless Snowfalls, we find the same pattern, while Asvarath's shrieks became a little more like the first Burzum ones - stronger and delivering senses of pain and suffering; the melodies are still played by tremolo picking, and being more than seven minutes long the whole song could probably get a little boring, especially taking into account that it's pretty similar to the former one.

Sept Sorcières (French for "seven witches") is a bit different, recalling the brilliant "Suicidal Emotions" by Abyssic Hate, with an overwhelming distorted guitar melody that every now and then covers the voice itself. The song has, actually, some breaks (especially in the end, just as the first track of the demo), but unlike Abyssic Hate's masterpiece, in this 10-minutes-long track Asvarath almost never changes the guitar melody, getting another time pretty boring and annoying. The last track is Soleil Noir ("black sun"), and it's a 4-minutes pure ambient track, with some keyboards playing over and over again a few number of notes, thus creating some melodies not that enjoyable or varied, even if probably we can not expect something "strange" in an acoustic ambient track of this kind. Anyways, I've found it pretty useless.

Everyone knows that in these subgenres of black metal, from the so-called suicidal/depressive one to the ambient one, a fundamental role is played by the emotional part, by the feelings that with so few instruments the artist should be able to create into the listener's mind. Asvarath is indeed a great singer for the canons of the genre, and while he's not that original (Burzum, Shane Rout and many others have been singing for decades!) his voice is quite enjoyable to me.

The bad thing is that, apart from the first two songs (that are, indeed, pretty similar to each other), the demo itself is nothing brilliant or particularly remarkable, and it will probably enjoyed only by those who are really into the suicidal/depressive kind of black metal. Asvarath's great vocals are the most interesting part of the album, but for what concerns the other instruments and, more than all, the melodical part of the songwriting, he has still a long way to go in my opinion: the distorted guitars play too few different musical patterns, and even in a subgenre that I adore like this one you need to write more complex, heterogeneous or - at least - "emotional" melodies.