Viking Funeral

Hull is another one of the many promising metal bands that are starting to draw attention to the Brooklyn, New York scene. I first caught wind of these guys when they opened up for Christian Death with Inswarm (another awesome local band). The sheer volume that the band played at immediately impressed me. If you want to replicate just how loud these cats play, you’re going to have to crank the shit out of your speakers, but given the quality of the music here, you should have been doing that anyway.

This EP, their debut, is comprised of a single multi-movement track by the name of “Viking Funeral”. Whether the song actually details the events of a Viking funeral is kind of hard to tell since the only intelligible bit of lyrics is “In the wake of the fire” which could mean just about anything. But that doesn’t really matter. What do matter are the riffs, and boy are there a lot of them. Hull has armed themselves with just about every trick in the book. Fast riffs, slow riffs, mid-paced riffs, chunky riffs, atmospheric riffs, groovy old school doom riffs... you name it, this band has it. When the band plays at high speeds they tend to use more hardcore influenced riffs, occasionally dipping into the more melodic end of modern hardcore. The rest of their material covers a lot of stylistic ground in the general field of “slow, down tuned, and heavy”.

The song starts off at high speeds and pulls an interesting trick to keep the momentum up. Instead of trying to up the stakes by playing faster they have the song get gradually slower as it goes on, reverting back into old school doom grooves and leads before eventually devolving into the most primal of Neurosis riffs. Then it drifts into a sort of metal primordial ooze, losing all shape. All of this occurs in the first 10 minutes and happens so naturally that it might be hard to notice that anything’s changing. The second half of the song then takes us back, step by step towards the high speed the song started at. When the band does resume it’s original pace, things once again begin to slow down until the song comes to an end.

The individual riffs in this song aren’t the type that you’re going to be humming a lot, but the minute you hear them on record you’ll have an “oh right, I remember this riff” moment. The song’s ebb and flow structure is both natural and engaging. Hull show a great deal of skill in every sub-style that they drift through from the faster hardcore material to the nearly post rock ambience in the middle of the song. The production on this album is solid as you can hear all three guitars, but it’s by no means high budget. The vocals are probably the least interesting element of the band. While the singers shout their way through the song, it would have been much more interesting to hear some clean vocals over some of these riffs. Overall, if you’re looking for a strong release by a fresh band, this is for you.