Of course, a funeral is bleak, the very idea of it. Grief, loss, despair, the shock of a vital presence suddenly become absence, all of it placed in a fishbowl for solemn reflection on the inevitability of death. And so funeral doom is bleak, the weight of death-doom made somehow heavier with the structure and timbre of the dirge. There’s a surprisingly high number of bands out there making funeral doom that really nails that bleakness, despondency, maximum solemnity and gloom.
Funerals, though, are also (or can be) celebrations of life, hope together with dismay, joy alongside melancholy in reflecting on what made somebody worth remembering in the first place and then what makes life worth living for those who remain. There is a surprisingly low number of bands out there making funeral doom that captures that light in the darkness. Oromet is one.
Art, obviously, uses the very intimate notion of life and death to speak metaphorically about ourselves and the world around us and Oromet’s funeral doom is no exception. The Sacramento duo of Dan Aguilar (guitar, vocals) and Patrick Hills (drums, bass, synth, backing vocals) makes songs on sophomore album, The Sinking Isle, about life and loss and dying and the impact of these on people and the world. As an ultra-niche form, most readers will already know what to expect from the music in the most basic sense: mostly a minimalist affair of big, slow, doom with deep, cavernous vocals howling about loss and its attendant misery, sometimes shaded with fragile hope. To make the new funeral doom album compelling, then, Oromet reached outside itself, careful not to step so far as to lose its identity.
Aguilar and Hills widen the scope of The Sinking Isle beyond hope to wonder and awe of the impossible beauty of life in nature, from earth to cosmos. The deep symbolism of Oromet’s art is an echo of the band and its players and their lives. At just a little more than an hour from the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains, Sacramento offers access to pristine places where one can immerse oneself in nature. The songs of The Sinking Isle resound with the emotion of that kind of experience, the grandeur of big sky and 10,000 foot vistas. In this way, Oromet shares spiritual pace with Agalloch and Wolves In The Throne Room, where multiple guitars draw light in the darkness of doom to emulate starlit skies and the reflected sunlight of snowy trees. Even the logo evokes nature with its mountainous silhouette. More directly, these songs fit with the exemplary notion of funeral doom, connecting with Skepticism and Mournful Congregation fundamentally and, more distinctly, with those whose doom rings through with regality and epic scope, like Vouna and especially While Heaven Wept.
“Hollow Dominion”’s pastoral opening sets the tone with gentle waterflow, emulated drips (really neat, actually), echoing acoustic strums and cymbals. Listeners might imagine an entrance to a cave system, moving into its dim light and slowly making one’s way through, around bends and corners, to open on a massive cavern signified at long last by the expected explosion of electric guitar and bass, and drums. The effect is a vastness thick with dark melancholy, right on time for funeral doom. But, where this subgenre so often forges a path straight down and stays there, Oromet’s guitars inevitably find an updraft in the gloom and ride it, gliding through the darkness to great heights. The resulting evocative bittersweetness brings the lyrics into relief, contrasting the majestic emptiness of a subterranean realm with the blind voracity of Man’s relentless ambition. Similarly, “Marathon” echoes the futile lust for glory in war, and “Forsaken Tarn” presents an allegory for the daily grind and the emptiness it can perpetuate.
As vast and nebulous as these themes are, the music explores them thoroughly and patiently. Guitars run a gamut of emotion from desperate and forlorn to tranquil and even enraptured, and there are multiple leads throughout, rolling slowly into and out of each other’s course, often blending beautifully. Most remarkably, the drums create an amazing dynamic framework for the instruments in the nearer foreground. Hills shows a rare ability to generate a strong, propulsive foundation while allowing ample space for the songs to breathe and live, a real testament to not only his skill, but to the pair’s commitment to thoughtful song crafting.
There’s no way a bunch of words, no matter how many, can truly convey the experience of the music, but considering the album’s art package may get us closer. Oromet’s self-titled debut set a high goddamn bar with its cover art, which featured a painting by esteemed fantasy artist Ted Nasmith that doesn’t actually but certainly could depict the Oromet of Tolkien’s Middle Earth. The Sinking Isle also features artwork by Nasmith (above) and, though it’s not expressed outright, those peaks seem very important beyond a cheeky nod to the secondness of the album. The cataclysmic fire and smoke around them is a stark departure from the debut’s gentle, serene setting (acknowledging that peak’s imposing presence), a shift found too in the music within. The damaged tower of the foreground peak, perhaps an observatory, smolders in the shadow of the second peak, an erupting volcano, as the waters below roil from fleeing ships and crumbling rocks and lava-lit fractures of the surrounding geology. The scene, together with album and song titles, as well as lyrics, alludes to the tragedy of Man, reaching ever higher, conquering peaks, only to be laid low by Nature, and often by his own hand, again and again.
It’s easy to imagine these guys in the mountains, sitting at the edge of a massive outcropping, legs dangling, minds drifting through the beauty beheld to the big questions and round again to what it all means right here right now, lyrics spawned by reflections on the futility of the rat race, riffs born from cloud shadow that makes even the surrounding peaks feel small. People transform in such moments, experience life-changing revelations, often humbling, sometimes daunting, perhaps exhilarating, in any case inspiring as a reminder of life’s great dualities. How fortunate for us that this particular pair of musicians have channeled their experiences into such wonderful art.
