Originally written by Jordan Campbell
As little as 5 years ago, The Funeral Pyre was a name bandied about in the same breath as Light This City and Arsis as potential sparkplugs in the melodic death metal engine. Interestingly, the Stateside evolution of the genre didn’t quite go as planned. As it stands presently, Arsis still kick ass in spite of being bitten by the tech-bug, Light This City packed it in after creating their only (mildly) transcendental record, and The Funeral Pyre has shifted their focus to a semi-dirty, semi-melodic brand of black metal.
Seemingly taking cues from recent crime-partners Book of Black Earth (especially in the drum department), The Funeral Pyre combine that band’s plodding death metal with some half-speed Dissection worship on this 5 track EP. The band eschews the buzzsaw toothgnash of other Dissection disciples such as Naglfar, Necrophobic, and Lord Belial, opting instead to grind with grit and grime–albeit unconvincingly. This Califorian quintet’s take is lumbering, subterranean (see the aptly titled “The Ocean Floor”) and congested, hacking it’s way through sheets of mud with repetitive riffing and pedestrian blackhowling.
December plays as a middling stopgap between the inane pandering of Abigail Williams and the malefic maelstrom of Withered. Not nearly as rewarding or deep as the latter, but not as trite or superficial as the former, The Funeral Pyre are stuck in a sort of Ameriblack limbo. Not quite death metal, not quite black metal, and certainly not as dyed-in-the-wool as a Woe or an Absu, the band have little to hang their hat on here—save for a review full of references to more impactful bands, and an EP filled with 5 nearly indistinguishable songs that seem twice as long as they actually are.
