Funeral Mist, Maranatha
Featured Album
The most evil, original, and unpredictable metal record of the year
These are the fears that haunt mankind: that you will grip the hand of a winged angel and have it turn into a cloven hoof. That plague will decimate and desolate, so that there is no distinction between the living and the dead. That the long-awaited follow-up to an epic meisterwork will not be regarded as a bold step forward by one of black metal's most alchemical practitioners.
The release of Maranatha, Funeral Mist's second full-length effort, following 2003's highly-regarded Salvation, has generated some controversy among the aficionados of black-is-black, for yea, it does contain glimmers of the dreaded white. The group's leader (and now, apparently, sole member) is Daniel Rosten, who founded the group in Stockholm in the mid-90's. Singing under the name of Arioch, playing all the instruments but drums (the percussionist is anonymous — rhymes with hieronymous), it features his unbelievably cratered voice, that Marduk has begun to make spectral use of in the last half-decade; but here is given free rein to create symphonic Biblikal schisms that echo not the faux-classical decoratives that haunt the frontier of black metal as it meets prog-rock. Arioch/Daniel draws instead from a rockist tradition, riffs bone-solid and relentless, and on a cut like "Blessed Curse," when the underpinning roundelay moves into a set-the-controls shotgun ride alongside the vocal and its accompanying preacher exhortations until you actually begin to believe the "smites" and prescribed penitents of divine justice wrought and raining down, "thy land powder and dust: from heaven shall it come down upon thee, until thou be destroyed."
It's the nu-black! Funeral Mist stand with other purveyors of originality like Opeth who realize that if you want to outsmart your deal with the devil, you've got to play him one better. And with its choral groupings, long surreal codas and rapid-fire dynamic twists, it's hardly predictable in the way that much of Death Metal can be, where ready-mades are always welcome but more archetypal than innovative. "Living Temples" has a children-of-the-damned choir bleeding into the last gasp vocal exhale that happens after breath's end, seguing into "Anathema Maranatha" and its howling strangle of the larynx; in "White Stone," the guitar chord is fed into a loop that is as much amplifier hum as downstroke. "I slayed the lion to become him," Arioch gutturals in "Anti-Flesh Nimbus," the sacrifice we make to become something greater, and so approaches the altar of his muse, ready to slay and play again.
