originally written by Chris McDonald
Some death metal bands are brutal. Funeral Whore are brutes.
Step into Damnation is so one-dimensional and formulaic in its barbarity that it becomes slightly humorous and strangely ominous at the same time. A crushing blend of Dismember, Incantation, and Autopsy (there’s none of that kind of stuff out there these days, right?), Funeral Whore reduces old-school death metal to its most primal, uncivilized core. There’s none of the hidden nostalgic joy in this music that runs rampant throughout the OSDM explosion. It’s just merciless darkness from start to finish.
The songs on Step into Damnation essentially operate in three modes: thunderous thrash rhythms, burly grooves, and doomed slowdowns. They use all three in virtually every track, with little variation in tonality or song structure. Tempos remain in a rumbling mid-pace, just fast enough to avoid the “doom/death” tag while never really striving for any sort of velocity. The drumming is absolutely archaic — the fills are sloppy and decrepit, and the delivery is about as straightforward as it gets. (Spoiler: there’s a lot of thrash beats.) Vocals are a throaty, cavernous growl.
Yes, there’s a million bands of this ilk running around these days, so what makes Funeral Whore worth your time? For one, the production on this thing is just about perfect. It’s an ideal blend of sounds, equal parts crushing distortion and howling ambience. The bass tone is full and loud, and gives the other instruments a bleak and foreboding backdrop on which to conduct their cryptic rites. You know what’s coming whenever the band breaks to introduce yet another storming riff, but it still kills you when it arrives because of how damn heavy the tone is. And while the songwriting may be formulaic, the platter of riffs never once disappointed me. Funeral Whore thankfully avoids relying on too many of the plodding slowdowns I find so tedious about Incantation and their clones, and the slower moments are carefully paced and constructed when they arise. There’s some surprisingly atmospheric lead work in play, and the grooves are choppy and direct. Nothing pretentious or overblown at all here. It’s working-class death metal that benefits from never trying to be more than exactly that.
Of course, any music this rudimentary in its approach is going to suffer when listening to the album start to finish. There’s no doubt that Step into Damnation is best suited to three- to four-song bursts, as listening from front to back can make the repetition a bit too noticeable. But this isn’t the kind of album that I’m going to knock too hard for a lack of ambition or variety; it portrays a single sound and idea with enough focus and skill to make it worth the sacrifice. In a style as popular as old-school death metal is right now, it becomes increasingly easy to distinguish between the bands that are generic and the bands that are generic in an unflinchingly kick-ass fashion. Funeral Whore is the latter. Recognize.
