This isn’t our site’s first encounter with Funeral Tears or the band’s new album Beyond the Horizon. Back in February I came across another advance track from the album called “Breathe” and was quite enthralled by it. And so it was an easy choice to bring you this premiere of another song from the album, which will be released on April 13 by Satanath Records (Russia) and Cimmerian Shade Recordings (USA). The new song is “I Suffocate“.
This is the third Funeral Tears album, but in case you haven’t encountered the band before, Funeral Tears is the solo project of Nikolay Seredov from Tomsk, Russia (who also leads the groups Стахановцы and Taiga).
“Breathe” is a deep breath, a slow cascade of crystalline guitars, shimmering ambience, and deep heaving bass. The music moves into heavier territory, propelled further into darkness by deep, jagged growls and equally craggy riffs, by agonized shrieks of pain and the pain-filled pulse of the guitar. It’s an uneasy dream, but dreamlike nonetheless.
As its name might suggest, “I Suffocate” is a more disturbing and depressive song, though not without its elements of beauty. The ghostly sounds and the discordant, mewling scratch of violin strings that open it foreshadow the haunting to come. The song’s ponderous, heavy, stalking pace and the gloomy, gargantuan chords are evocative of death and decay. Harsh, near-whispers express the lyrics over an arpeggio that moves like a drifting spirit with no way home, and the voice later turns cavernous and abrading — or abrasively shrieking. The glints of beauty come from ethereal shimmering and even from the jagged, bereft melody with which it’s paired, stricken in its sense of irreversible loss.
The funeral doom of “I Suffocate” is deeply atmospheric and trance-like, capable of irresistibly changing the listener’s mood, turning it in dark directions.
Below we have “Breath” as well as “I Suffocate”, and a third song from the album, which is available in video form (“Dehiscing Emptiness”). Order here:
https://satanath.bandcamp.com/album/sat170-funeral-tears-beyond-the-horizon-2017
Funeral Tears on Facebook:
http://www.facebook.com/funeraltearsrus