Works Will Come Undone

I will be frank: this album was my very first venture into funeral doom metal. I have heard many words by people mystified and shocked by this strange genre, yet I have heard very little detail as to what actually constitutes a funeral doom song. Thus, I decided to make a bit of original research, and look into Asunder, a band I had heard associated with the genre quite a bit. After listening to this album, I can assure the reader of four things about Asunder, and in effect, funeral doom metal:

1. It's an extremely slow genre of music. At the most, there's two points in Asunder's 80-minute epic when the tempo rises above 100 beats per minute. It's not drone/doom-slow, but it's far slower than any other genre of music you'll come across.
2. At its core, it's essentially death/doom metal on barbituates.
3. It's best buddies with dark ambient and other atmospheric genres, so expect a lot of both throughout the music's length.
4. Despite its ridiculous length, it is through some magical force able to captivate the listener as it slowly drags itself along through massive song lengths.

That's not to say this release is perfect, but it's far from terrible. Asunder seem to be perfectly stylized for the type of music they desire to play. And although there is a 20-minute blunder that severely hurts the album as a whole, it's altogether a worthwhile experience.

Compared to many drone bands with similar-length songs, Asunder have composed a relatively large amount of riffs at their disposal, and though the music does tend to repeat its riffs often, it's constantly adding ambient and atmospheric background elements to keep the experience from going dry before the band decides to change gear. The riffs range from mournful acoustics to droning, imposing behemoths that sound like a deathgrind band slowed down to subsonic levels, and they never fail in evoking some sort of feeling from your mind. The riffs never try to go for anything that sounds "cool" in the conventional sense of the word; most of them are focused on creating the vastest, most scenic landscape as possible inside your mind. Be it a cold winter daybreak or a Chinese forest's misty dusk, the album basically always has some imagery in your mind. And that's always going to get you bonus points from me - when music expands beyond the sense of hearing and affects your sense of sight (if only sight), your band is obviously doing something right. Despite all this mental image evocation mumbo-jumbo, the riffs are musically pleasing as well; with the ambience and rhythm guitars to back the lead guitar up, every single riff is chock-full of entertaining, calming melody. For riffs that are at best 80 beats per minute, the guitarists have more than done their part in keeping the music immersive. The drummer is doing a fine job as well. Of course, he's not doing anything amazing or worth special notice, but when you're going for a slow, mournful tone reminiscent of a funeral march, creating technical fills to show off your drumming skills obviously isn't going to help the music in any way. He makes felicitous use of the cymbals, which are more essential to the beat of this style of music than any other element.

There is an equal use of singing and growling on this album. Well, it's not exactly singing - more like melodic chanting, similar to that of a funeral march (duh). While the chants are near-perfect in their execution - almost always serving as a complement to the lead melody as opposed to taking center stage - the growls could use a bit of work. While they are vehement and strong, they're not often deep enough and their tone feels hoarse and raspy.

Remember that blunder I mentioned earlier? Well, it turns out that Asunder has decided to play a little trick on their listeners. Those who see the length of the second and last track on Works Will Come Undone, "Rite of Finality", would most likely be surprised to see it's over 50 minutes in length. Well, for those of you preparing to listen to the album that are throwing a brouhaha because they're expecting to listen to some epic near-hour-long atmospheric mammoth of a song - well, I hate to be a killjoy, but you may leave your excitement at the door, as you'll find with much disappointment, just like I did, that over half of the length of "Rite of Finality" is a bunch of crappy ambient, making the track only minutes longer than "A Famine". I remember listening to it the first time, sitting there at the beginning of the ambient nonsense, waiting for the epic doom portion of Asunder's music to return with a thunderous force...And it never did. Asunder's story, their final album and the one that they'll be remembered by forever, concludes with a bunch of lackluster atmospheric bullshit. Now, I could have stood thirty seconds of it - hell, I would be fine with two minutes of it. But twenty minutes of it? And it's not even good ambient, for God's sake. Okay, if you've ever been around any opponents of Sunn O)))'s music, I'm sure you've heard their classic argument - "it sounds like a refrigerator". Well, I disagree; Sunn O)))'s music sure has a lot of melody and rhythm, and I've never heard any sort of musical refrigerator. But guess what, folks - this faux ambient actually does sound like a refrigerator! Sure, throughout the crappy ambient, every few seconds you get some weird shuffling noise, for a few minutes you get what sounds like E.T. reading his daily verse out of his copy of the Holy Xopiw, and you also get some guest vocals by some constantly depressed alien race whose beings eat testosterone implants for breakfast. But all in all, it can't do anything to redeem the last half of the song. For all intents and purposes, the song "Rite of Finality" is 27 minutes long, unless you have an affinity for repetitive, boring ambience.

"A Famine" is the darker of the two tracks, having a much more ominous tone than "Rite of Finality", but I will give the latter its dues - it certainly inspires much more imagery and imagination. They are both great tracks, so check them both out. One last flaw I feel I must point out, though - the music has a strange quality of leaving your mind as soon as it's over. You can recall the entire song by memory while it's playing, but pause it and try to remember any of it. It's near fucking impossible. I guess you can think of it as an analogy: Asunder's music is actually a date rapist who drugs you with roofies and date rapes you with its wonderful qualities, but then you wake up and can't remember it happened at all.

Flaws aside, this is a very worthwhile release and I'll certainly be returning to the world of funeral doom metal sometime soon. Though not for those with attention deficit disorder, Works Will Come Undone is a great release and should not be ignored.

As the summer that barely came ebbs out its last lights in frequent bouts of wind, rain and general meteorological misery, now seems an apt time to break out that most downtrodden and bleakest of genres to accompany us all through the autumn and winter months, funeral doom metal. The recent, brilliant, Ahab album reminded me after a relative drought of funereal listening just how powerful and fucking great life can be in the slow lane, thus influencing my decision to dust off one of my personal faves from the genre, Asunder's 2006 piece "Works Will Come Undone".

Even by the lofty heights of funeral doom the composition of this album does not make easy reading for the light of heart. Asunder's second full length provides just two songs in a mammoth 72 minutes and 49 seconds, "A Famine" being a paltry 22 minutes and "The Rite Of Finality" occupying a gargantuan 50 minutes of disc space.

Putting into words my exact feelings towards this album is difficult, as well as the fear it will be probably pointless for so few who read this will 'get' music this painfully slow and uncompromising. The combined vocals of Dino Sommese and John Gossard are wretched growls for the most part, though both songs in their early stages feature some effective dual-vocalling between one clean, delayed and echoing vocal against a harsher throatier delivery. As would be expected for songs so long the guitars don't play a continual role, often providing a riff or punctuation of the chord every few seconds, thus allowing the droning feedback of the amplifiers to do much of the dirty work. These guitars however maintain a cleaner sound and clarity in respect to Ahab for example where their guitar sound alone was responsible for the claustrophobic, despairing dread noticed across their albums. Which leads me on to what about Asunder earns them the necessary despairing feel to be lauded as a funeral doom great - the cello work of Jackie Perez-Gratz. By no means is she an ever-present across the album's journey but when the mournful sound of her instrument registers, the gloom already experienced disappears into a fog of utter darkness and sobriety.

Like the best extreme doom, such is the vastness of the 'riffs' played that their dirge-like speed seems entirely necessary; they simply are too heavy and concrete to move any faster. This facet, to me largely created by Electric Wizard, is a great boon to any band that possesses it. "A Famine" starts off like an entertainer at a funeral, too saddened and emotional to really do much but weep, before the first wave of riffs hits in, beginning their slow tectonic movements across the landscape punctuated as they are by the beautiful cello of Perez-Gratz. Such is the sadness that I feel in what could only be described as the lead riff in the opening song a feel of mellowness is apparent, in the kind of a man who has accepted his fate in the final hours before his execution, a tragic piece of extreme music.

Where "A Famine" could be seen as the build-up to execution, "The Rite Of Finality" is surely the reading of the last rites before the act of death. The cello enters at a very early stage to the sound of soft and clean guitar strokes and softened drum blows as the song slowly drifts into more dynamic territory with a bounding, heavier lead riff. Realising all this may sound like impervious drab, whilst being unapproachable to almost all like certain black metal albums, “Works…” is based upon the indescribable feel when listened to in the near dark and in the right settings. This becomes all the more apparent as around the 24 minute stage, the guitars and cello slow ebb away as the last breathe of oxygen is taken to be replaced by realisation of the death via 26-odd minutes of feedback-laden drone. The song could be read as being finished at this point as the distance moved in this time is almost non-existent but it is not without it's purpose. While too long I would proffer, it does feel like the journey has crossed into the after-world; the feel of nothing making any sense but a coruscating, vibrating band of droning feedback clearly not 'normal' in anyone's senses.

Finally, proceedings slowly, quietly draw to an end. Music of this nature was never meant to have mass appeal but with this result, Asunder may have made an album that has become so bleak that it could gain an extra appeal. Maybe not, but it is one of the most intense and extreme doom albums I've heard and were it not for the significant length of concluding feedback, we could've seen it's results become even higher.

Originally written for Rockfreaks.net

First off, I want my $15 back that I paid for this CD. The advertisement that made me buy it was a total lie. The future of doom, my ass.

This is one colossal disappointment from beginning to end, so where to start? On Works Will Come Undone, everything has gone horribly wrong and the guitars seem to be one of the main culprits behind this. People familiar with USBM will undoubtedly recognize the name John Gossard, mainly for his contributions to Weakling; he is also one of the guitarists in Asunder, but you would never know it's the same guy. Weakling had amazing (if fairly monotonous) riffs that were at the same time, pretty propulsive, giving the music a strong sense of forward motion. With WWCU Asunder has not written a decent riff for either song, or really written anything that could actually be called a riff in the traditional sense of the word. If someone asked me about the guitars on WWCU, the first word and most descriptive word that comes to mind is "wandering" (but not in a way in marginally interesting). In this sense they borrow heavily from droners like Earth and Sunn, but without recognizable riffs; and since the guitars are fairly muted in the mix, the overwhelming heaviness just isn't there, and for me, that's the only thing that makes those bands even semi-tolerable. Not that doom like this needs to have Electric Wizard riffery to be good, but a little bit of that might have helped immensely.

So what could be worse than having less riffs in the entire 45 min run time (I'll excuse them the noisedrone that closes out track 2, as that seems to be the only decent thing on the entire CD) then most techgrind spazztics cram into 45 seconds? How about songs that start with stupidly long intros and take equally as long to fade out? I know it's fashionable to build up to massively heavy parts to make them seem even heavier, but these songs don't build up to anything. In fact, these contain probably the first crescendos that don't ever crescendo. Couple that to the 4 minute fade out in "A Famine" and you have very little actual funeral doom in each song (I know there are some out there that think long acoustic intros are probably the most "funeral" part of any funeral doom album, but they are completely wrong. Acoustic intros are not heavy, they are not frightening, they are not evil, they are not depressive; they are gigantic wastes of time, unless you're a thrashing maniac or a death fiend, then 30 to 40 seconds might be tolerable). Contrast this with bands like Uncertainty Principle or Esoteric or Evoken, who write slightly shorter songs (sometimes) and when their songs crescendo, you know something insanely heavy is coming.

And that brings me to the third failure of this album, and what I think is it's biggest failure. WWCU is not heavy. Not like Sunn, not like Until Death Overtakes Me, not like Thergothon, not like Disembowelment, not like Skepticism. Not like Whitehorse. Not like Catacombs. This is probably the least heavy funeral doom album I've ever had the displeasure of listening to. Sure it's produced well, everything is crystal clear and fairly clean, but at some point, unless the bass starts heaving and rumbling in seismic waves, or the drums, particularily the ride and the crash, start raining discordant cacophony through the speakers, the music sounds weak, and neither the bass nor drums ever do that. The only way this could be considered heavy is if you spent all your time listening to bedroom black metal, and had never actually heard a real bass guitar or real bass drum or toms or cymbals. This tries to get by on atmosphere (maybe by inducing heaviness through sleepiness and boredom) but that doesn't work, because there is no atmosphere in this recording. Where's the dreariness, the funereality, the despair that so many other bands have captured aurally? It's just boring. Sure they throw some cello in every now and then, but that just serves to annoy more than anything, because the cello is not a metal instrument (unless you're playing folk metal or gothic metal, and both of those are about as metal as Top 40).

This is why so many people cannot stand doom metal. It's excruciatingly boring, artfully pretentious (but then I guess that's pretty common in both the funeral doom and USBM scenes, so Gossard's got a two-fer there), and ridiculously bland. After listening to this, not a single riff comes to mind, and not a single moment on the entire disc sticks in my memory; this could be an entire album of intros strung together as songs and the listener would be none the wiser. (It gets a 34 only because I do enjoy the last 25 minutes of actual drone that ends "Rite of Finality," it's probably the closest thing to interesting on the CD). I would recommend this only to people that don't like heavy funeral doom, that don't like interesting "true" doom, that don't like noisy atmospheric doom, and that don't like riff & roll stoner doom-this one's for you.

This was one of the first Asunder albums I had heard. I was impressed with it, because for some reason, I had the idea that doom metal wasn't all that special, but now I realize that I was greatly mistaken. Asunder, to me, is one of the leading doom bands. With this release, they have pushed themselves even further. Pumping out 70 minuet CDs isn't an easy thing to do, especially if there is only two songs on it.

"A Famine" - I really enjoy this song. It has elements of clean guitars, but also has the power of distortion and guttural vocals. Starting off the CD with this track was a good idea since "Rite of Finality" isn't a power piece at the beginning. The guitar work on this song is excellent. There are no mistakes and everything is so tight. It would be difficult to be so tight in a doom band that has hour long songs. Memorizing one or two Asunder songs is like memorizing another band's entire album, plus some more. The drums are always simple, but are played very well, there are no accidental temo changes, which is hard to do at such a slow speed. The vocals make for a nice harmony with the cello at the beginning, but also carry out the song all the way through. The clean vocals are in tune, and the growls are deep and professionally done.

"Rite of Finality" - This song isn't as good as "A Famine", but it still is classic Asunder and finishes the CD ok, but they could have written another song instead of having the thirty minutes of ambient stuff, or they could have just had the CD be only 50 minutes long. It seems like they got tired or writing, and just said, "Hey, let's put 30 minutes of nothing after this song to extend the CD length." The guitar intro to this song is enchanting. It isn't any crazy hard/fast acoustic thing, it is just a tasteful riff, that also has emotion. Asunder comes across as evil, but still melodic. This song is a perfect example of that. Just like "A Famine", all the instruments and vocals are precise and very well played.

I give this album a 85 because they really could have taken out the ambient stuff, and "Rite of Finality" just didn't do it for me like "A Famine" did. This is a great album, and I recommend it to anyone who hasn't heard doom metal, or is already a big fan. Asunder is a must for any metal-head.

Wow, what a behemoth of an album! Never have I heard such slow, powerful music before! Definitely not for the people with short attention spans, this album does tend to drag on at times, but rarely. Always bringing something new to the table with each passing moment, this album runs rings around the genres of doom and progressive metal. The atmosphere is powerful and the music is meaningful.

Powered by waves of sonic explosions of orgasmic doomy goodness, every single musical piece on this album is played with pure emotion, giving the music even more dynamic power under it’s gloomy, down-tempo metal style. The guitar solos are sweeping melodies of beautiful elegance, the vocals are harmonic with the deep tunes of the bass as well brutal and disenchanting, and the atmosphere is enticing and depressing as hell.

This album is perfect for anyone looking for something different, even in the genre of funeral doom, and is also not for the people with A.D.D. It will probably take several listens before the hook is finally found, or it will catch you instantly and hold you firm from the first minute on. Overall, the album is solid and essential to any doom metal collection. For fans of The Gault, Shape Of Despair, Massive Bereavement, Sunn O))), and Life’s Decay.

This monolithic two track album is my first experience of Asunder, but they're certainly a group that I'll be following faithfully in the future. Whilst initially appearing to emerge from the same art-noise-doom-drone scene seemingly (though not really) spawned by the (actually structurally unexciting) Isis, 'Works Will Come Undone' offers two key aspects often missing from that now-crowded genre - heart and restraint.

The albums brooding pace and moody, earthen sonics - the latter provided by an on-form Billy Anderson, returning to my good books after his frankly crap work on the last Primordial record - combine with a measured, darkly sulking cello (provided by Jackie Gratz of Amber Asylum) create a singular atmosphere which sets them apart from many of their musical peers.

The album acheives that oft-longed-for-seldom-acheived quality: the feeling that one has spent half the time listening to it that has actually been consumed. To be sure, this record does fucking go on a bit: one hour and twelve minutes go by from one end to the other, but it sure as hell doesn't feel like it. I found it hard to beleive that I sat through a 50:00 song without losing patience/consciousness, but that I managed it is a testament to Asunder's consistent skill and invention. Not for them are cheap 'on a dime' time signature changes or sudden melodic shifts in an attempt to grasp attention, instead relying on subtlety, depth and quality songwriting. There you have the 'restraint' - 'Works Will Come Undone' builds tension throughout without ever seeming contrived, and never outstays its welcome whilst being twice as long as many other albums in its field.

Ah yes, the 'heart': I challenge you to sit through the record without once being quite seriously moved. I don't mean 'moved' in the respect that Trivium or MCR or even modern day In Flames apparently do in the modern, simultaneously depressing and self-aggrandising idiom of most popular 'alternative music'. I mean really fucking moved; like the tectonic plates move when the earth farts; like when someone accuses Bob Geldof of being the fake bastard he really is; like when you hear a great fucking album.

Buy this now.