The Sleep of Morbid Dreams

It took a long time for releasing "The Sleep Of Morbid Dreams", but I must admit that for Funebrarum...it was quite a quick pace anyway! After the release of the very promising "Beneath The Columns Of Abandoned Gods", this group met with a rather mediocre reception. Despite this, it did not stop its further activity, and so in the following years the ep "Dormant Hallucination" was released (with songs from the debut, but also with 1 new one), split with Interment (similar situation as above) and finally the mentioned "The Sleep...". And it's not without reason that I say "finally". Well, so many years of activity break caused a huge insufficiency for another dose of premiere music from Funebrarum.

After the content of "The Sleep Of Morbid Dreams", there is nothing to be surprised about this "insufficiency". Compared to the debut, the leap here is huge. What's more, even in relation to other bands combining American and Swedish death metal, the compositional level soared verrry high. Well, over these 8 years, the style of Funebrarum has changed significantly. The easiest way to explain it's that the quintet took the best of everything from Grave, Entombed, Cannibal Corpse and Incantation, filtered it through part of patents from debut and closed these elements in such a way that it was equally brutal, rhythmic, gloomy, with a "sandy" sound and an interesting (i.e. in this case, not too extravagant) technique. Apart from these changes, however, there is something even more important that sets this album apart. Well, "The Sleep Of Morbid Dreams" emanates incredible energy...at literally every moment! Just listen to "Incineration Of Mortal Flesh", "Grave Reaper", "Among The Exiled", "Cursed Eternity" or "Perrish Beneath", although the power is so daring here that I would recommend checking all of the songs. Interestingly, even more lindgrenish vocals by Daryl (although the lower ones also remained - even though there is no Demilich-like this time) do not come into a worse reception of "The Sleep...". I will say more, there is nothing to complain about this album.

Quite a long wait for the successor to "Beneath The Columns Of Abandoned Gods" definitely paid off. After eight years, the Americans from Funebrarum moved to slightly different areas than on their debut and they managed to find their way in such a bit "changed", though still death metal style. The combination of Swedish and American death metal turned out to be so delicious that it's really difficult to have any resistance here before giving this album maximum rating.

Originally on: https://subiektywnymetal.blogspot.com/2022/07/funebrarum-sleep-of-morbid-dreams-2009.html

If you were a death metal fan in the 2000’s, there’s a good chance you stumbled upon New Jersey’s Funebrarum. This American death metal group eschewed all modern death metal trends of that decade – you wouldn’t be labeling this as brutal or technical death metal, nor was it melodic like many of their Swedish counterparts. Instead, Funebrarum were at the forefront of a wave of bands that were playing dark and cavernous death metal with its influences in many early 90’s bands. As the decade closed, Funebrarum released their sophomore album in 2009, “The Sleep of Morbid Dreams,” which has certainly stood the test of time all these years later.

Funebrarum is from New Jersey, so it’s pretty easy to attribute their sound to the NYDM scene, and to a point that’s accurate. It is comparably dark to bands like Incantation, utilizing doom metal sections and inhumanly low vocals. However, it is Finnish death metal that seems to be the primary influence on “The Sleep of Morbid Dreams,” as they share a common sense of dark melody, rhythmic feels, and knack for hooks with their Finnish counterparts. It’s easy to hear bands like Abhorrence, Convulse, Disgrace, and many others in these low tuned riffs. Often, they’ll utilize an evil sounding melody that’s over a fairly simple chord progression, and the kind of scales they use really relate it back to these Finnish greats. Hell, there’s even a quirky, Demilich like riff before the doom part later in “Beyond Recognition.”

Among many of the bands playing cavernous death metal around this time, Funebrarum certainly had a knack for having hooks in their songs, and they would do this by pairing a riff with plenty of identity, with a simple repeated vocal pattern. “Grave Reaper,” a track from a previous split with Interment, is a fan favourite due to its caveman bounce and recognizable chorus. Meanwhile, other songs will pair these absolutely flesh ripping tremolo riffs that carve out infectious patterns with yet another catchy vocal pattern. “Incineration of Mortal Flesh” is a prime example of this, you won’t miss the title of the track if you didn’t read it before hand. Likewise, the epic track “Nex Monumentum” gets away with doing this on a couple different parts, and they both really hit that sweet spot of where death metal should hit.

While a lot of these low tuned, cavernous death metal bands of this time would purposely present their music with raw or murky production, this not the case with Funebrarum. This is by no means a “modern” sounding recording, as there are no typewriter drums to be heard here. That being said, it is a fairly clear recording, and despite the low tuning, it’s not hard to distinguish the powerful bass and the heavy guitars from one another. The kick drums are present without being distracting, and the the toms are really in your face too. There’s some nice production touches like the keys in “Nex Monumentum” which add to that gloomy Finnish atmosphere even more. Overall, this is a fantastic sounding record that emphasizes the power of the riffs and performances without sucking the life out of it or making it too murky.

It’s been a dozen years since “The Sleep of Morbid Dreams” came out, and further established Funebrarum as one of the premiere bands in this era of death metal. By taking a huge amount of Finnish death metal influence and some remnants of NYDM, this record has a sound that just hits right when it comes to death metal. Many fans, myself included, have been anxiously awaiting the follow up record, as the few shorter releases they’ve released in the meantime have only heightened the anticipation. As such, there’s no better time to give this record another listen if you haven’t in a while, and I’m sure you’ll find it’ll set the bar pretty high for the follow up record that’s due out this year.

For the last three years I've been trying to think of a single reason why this album doesn't top Incantation, Convulse, Adramelech, Abhorrence, or any of the other death metal masters of old which I adore, and after hundreds of listens it has finally dawned on me that it is a fruitless effort. This is absolutely superb, and no real complaint can be leveled against it, honestly, if you asked me to pinpoint where I removed the one percentage point from my score, I couldn't come up with a reason better than Nex Monumentum should have been the album closer since I like it when albums close on a long, epic number. I'm not even sure if that counts as something worth taking a point off for though, since Among The Exiled is still a beast of a track. So, what makes these guys so brilliant? My best justification is that they are old school, yet not primitive. This is OSDM reinvented for the modern age, and I feel no doubt in calling this a modern day classic.

Obviously, Funebrarum are a member of the new OSDM movement, and as such they're made up of pretty much entirely old fashioned parts, the guitar tone is dense and crunchy with a fairly sharp edge when they go into attack mode, it's not nearly as muddy as most old acts or modern ones following their paths, and when you consider that Beneath the Columns of Abandoned Gods was just about the muddiest, most bottomed out recording ever made it is quite a shock. The riffs are mostly made up of tremolos, Finndeath leads and chunky pounding riffs, with no shredding or dissonant jangling as per the modern ideals, the songs are composed with a recurring mix of fast, blasted parts, and slower passages, with vocals that exist mostly in a hoarse roar. All of these nuts and bolts have all been in the framework of death metal for over twenty years, The Sleep of Morbid Dreams simply oils every moving part and paints everything visible with a new sheen to make it into a wholly reborn beast.

The music on offer here is more or less a combination of Abhorrence's crazed tremolo riffing, Convulse's pummeling grooves, and Adramelech's lovely jangly melodies, and to avoid being purely Finnish worship it is all delivered in a straight forward American style of sheer violence and brutality. If that combination of ideas doesn't excite you, you're dead inside. Not only is it influenced by awesome music, it's also unique; no other bands in this retro death metal scene, or hell, no other bands in the genuine article have this sort of mash up of half a Finland's wildly varying styles, all jammed through an American brutality filter. There's basically no Incantation in it either, obviously, there are people who see any band who has tremolo riffs, an old school sound, and a fast meets slower style as being exactly the same as Incantation, but those people are morons. There's no real doom here, the slow is pretty much all pummeling Convulse riffs with a fancy new sharp as hell guitar tone, it's heavy, brutish and groovy, but not doomy. The sound is clear, with a pretty good focus on note differentiation, rather than a muddy wall of evil, the vocals are more hoarse and roared than simply growled from the bowels of hell, and most damning is the riffing style of tremolos. Incantation primarily used crawling, twisted and evil tremolo riffs that were usually not all that busy, usually playing around with atonality when they did go for the more active styles, the tremolos here are more technical, featuring frequent melodic shifts all over the fretboard and carefully timed bursts of higher pitched sharper flurries, with practically no moments of evil churning away on one or two notes in a creepy fashion. This is exactly like what Abhorrence did with theirs, this is just performed a bit cleaner and much more aggressively.

What's more, not only are the riffs fresh and exciting, they're also easily differentiated from one another. They're constructed so carefully that no riffs seem to be filler, and the busy frantic picking manages to use the same general approaches and ideas, while never sounding to identical to the other riffs that surround it. The grooving riffs also can be hooky, or just plain heavy, or they can be a companion to some twisted lead work, or they can be dark and ominous, there are no worries about the riffing ideas feeling stale or too similar to one another.

The songs utilise the wide range of excellent riffs on offer here very well, headbanging grooves are frequently offset by magnificent melodic leads or intense, high tempo blasted tremolo riffs. And I mean intense, the massive production here, and the outstanding riffs themselves make these uptempo riff shifts jump out at you with a fury you won't find outside of Disciples of Mockery. All the style transitions are large enough to make you shut up and take notice, yet smooth enough to feel like logical developments, the composition skills here are absolutely perfect.

Speaking of absolutely perfect, Shawn Eldridge may very well be the best straight up death metal drummer in the world. While in the many opportunities he's given to show it, he does show himself to be a very, very fast drummer, both in sheer high speed endurance blasts and in hectic all over the kit bashings, I'm not sure if he's got the insane tech death drummer skills, but when it comes to actually writing drumming for genuine, mean and badass death metal, he's on a whole different level to anyone else I've heard. Eldridge injects every groove with little touches and unexpected flairs that really make the already great riffs rise above and beyond. It can be just an extra symbol here, and quick double or triple tap on the snare where a single would usually be used, it's fantastic, unintrusive, fitting, yet exciting and volatile all at once. Then you've got him when he speeds up, not only is he fast as all hell, he's inventive. His kit does lose the kick drums a little at the higher tempos, which I feel is a perfectly fine trade to avoid some obnoxious triggering, but he makes up for it with overwhelming snare hit speed and frenzied symbol bashing. The way he moves around his crash during the blast beats is absolutely wonderful, allowing him to get all the impressive variation of a fill while not letting up on intense blasts or grind beats. This is truly one of the best drumming performances ever recorded on a regular death metal album.

With guitar work and drumming as brilliant as this, the album would be excellent at any rate, but Daryl Kahan and Dave Wagner add the final touches on this masterpiece. Kahan's voice isn't as low as on the debut, instead, delivering a higher pitched, throatier roar, it sounds a little bit tinkered with, but still very good. He varies his tempo and enunciation quite frequently, and the general unusual nature of it helps him stay sounding interesting throughout. In addition to this, he's got a couple of high pitched screams, but much less than you would expect someone who has done vocals for a black metal band, as well as a few times where he seems to scream so hard that it seems to break the very microphone itself, such as the "Tortured forever" part of Cursed Eternity, and it sounds utterly badass. Dave Wagner's bass is impressive in that it not only manages to be audible among the chaos, but manages to fight it's way to actually being imposing in it's own right. In addition to adding meat to back up the cool Finndeath leads, destructive bass hits are used to emphasize some of the violent hyper speed riffs too on tracks like Grave Reaper.

Funebrarum's second full length album is a true master work, taking everything that ruled about the death metal bands of old, and boosting the violence and technicality to modern levels, and takes the old school production and tinkers with it until it's as furious as the music. It's got amazing riffs, amazing drums, amazing vocals, amazing bass, the songs are put together exquisitely and it's inventive, there is not a single area where this album can be picked apart, I've tried to find it for three years, and it simply doesn't exist, this is as good as anything any band has put out regardless of time frame.

A voice, like from a 60s or 70s horror movie, announces that you have entered Hell, where Satan himself rules and feasts on the blood of the damned and that is exactly where Funebrarum's The Sleep of Morbid Dreams takes you. The music itself starts fairly slow with a crushing riff and some cymbals and while the drums come full in for a slow beat, the rhythm guitar is joined by its companion playing lead in the background, first ominously tapping then transforming into tremolo which take the forefront as the song really kicks into gear. These melodic parts are scarce on the album though. What The Sleep of Morbid Dreams is more about is the pummeling drums combined with bestial vocals and crushing yet often surprisingly fluidly moving riffs.

The band utilizes a lot of tremolo-picked riffs, quite reminiscent of the early Finnish death metal scene. More than a few lines could be drawn between The Sleep of Morbid Dreams and World without God. These tremolo riffs are crucial even if one might think more percussive riffing to be more effective in crushing the listener. However they are more there to create a more frantic feeling while it's the drums and vocals that bring the heaviness to these faster parts. Shawn Eldridge, the drummer, seems to be everywhere at once. He beats everything frantically and at the exact time that they are supposed to be hit. He is spot on with all of his cymbals and especially his use of crash is a joy to listen to. It helps a whole damn lot that they're produced to absolutele perfection. The snare perhaps overpowers the bassdrum a bit on blastbeats, but the cymbals are cool and crisp with the treble sounds and the open hi-hat is deliciously spacious. One of the best parts of the album is the half a minute intro of Grave Reaper, which starts off with a frantic double bass beat with no snare, but Eldridge beating the hell out of his crash. Then it transforms into a proper beat with a cool ride pattern that includes an opening of the hi-hat and then alternating again into him smashing his snare and hi-hat to pulp. Simply delightful.

Another highlight besides the drums is the vocals. Daryl Kahan is very versatile with his stylings. Mostly he has a low, slightly dripping, bestial grunt that sometimes goes even to murmur levels, but he also shows off some - albeit very little - hoarse shouting and harsh growls along the lines of gothenburg stylings. But it is the bestial and demonic nature of the main style of his vocals that make them so magnificent. They fit so well with the darkness of the compositions and production, the pounding drums and the tremolo riffs. It is surprising how little of the actual riffing is percussive and how much of it is tremolo. With a guitar sound as crunchy as this you wouldn't have expected a decision like that.

In short, it's a mesh of early Grave, Finnish death metal and some Incantation, but that's hardly enough to describe The Sleep of Morbid Dreams as a whole. While Jörgen Sandström's vocals on Into the Grave were brutal, they're not much in comparison to Kahan and the drumming is much more impressive. The Sleep of Morbid Dreams isn't quite the dank dungeon or dark tomb as Beneath the Columns of Abandoned Gods was, but neither does it really try to be. It is a more fiery-souled creation, a maelstrom of brimstone. Where as the debut was a Hell built to trap and maim your mind, The Sleep of Morbid Dreams takes the more direct and easier route to maim your body. And it does succeed.

People, I really like Death Metal more than my current history of reviewing shows. I just feel that I am not quite ready to review some of the all-time classics of the genre, as it is too daunting for me to undertake at this point in time. But that won’t stop me from reviewing Funebrarum’s The Sleep of Morbid Dreams!

This album is pretty much what you would expect from a Death Metal record created by a bunch of guys who love the style and who hail from the older, more pure days. This is packed with visceral, pounding and thrashy riffing heavied up to 11, packed in the dark, dissonant atmosphere and thick, punishing guitar sound, along with throaty, deep growls and drumming fast enough to tear your head off. And that is exactly why it is so good – it is everything you expect, written by professionals and performed with such a vicious hunger that it’s hard to believe that this isn’t from 1992 or so.

I really dig the heavy, pulverizing groove present on here, which never takes away from the head-smashing riffage in the fucking least. The whole atmosphere and vibe is just like one of the classic bands. In fact, it’s like many of the classic bands, sounding right in the middle of the sounds of any number of Death Metal pioneers from all over the world. Their influences are wide spread but also condensed, not sounding like a rip-off or a tribute to anything due to the huge range of them.

But that isn’t why anyone likes this; it’s because it just kicks ass. “Perish Beneath” kicks up with jagged rhythms and riffs as sharp as glass, and the sinister “Grave Reaper” beefs things up even further. The speedy “Beyond Recognition” lives up to its name by simply pummeling away at your face until it is, well…you get the idea. “Nex Momentum” is 8 minutes long and a slower cut, with a lot of great atmosphere and satisfyingly heavy riffs making for a Death Metal epic that gets my certificate of approval.

There isn’t a whole lot to say about why this album is good. It just is - it’s a Death Metal album that does what a Death Metal album does and succeeds at it wholeheartedly. Damn fine stuff, and certainly a keeper for anyone who loves the style. Highly Recommended.

Originally written for http://www.metalcrypt.com

Cyclone Empire seems to be headed in the right direction as they snap up tasteful old school death metal acts and issue records like this sophomore full-length from New Jersey's Funebrarum. If you fancied their split with Sweden's Interment a few years ago you'll know what to expect here: brutal old school 90s death metal with both Swedish and Floridian influence. Gnarled compositions of utter darkness and conquering grooves, aimless and seizure-inducing lead work, and vocals that can unearth those long committed to the earth for a corpse incursion into the world of the fickle living. You'd expect members of Evoken and Abazagorath to know their shit: you would be correct.

The Sleep of Morbid Dreams is a monolith of pure brutality, real fucking death metal. "Perish Beneath" opens with a creepy horror sample before unhinging destructive Bolt Thrower style rhythms under a decrepit winding melody. The track picks up as Daryl Kahan's low register pulverized the living flesh into a mash of writhing maggots and guts. "Grave Reaper" is like Incantation meets early Entombed meets more Bolt Thrower, repulsive grooves which can wither your speakers. At this point the album is already superior to its predecessor Beneath the Columns of Abandoned Gods, but there are still five tracks to go, led off by "Beyond Recognition", a festive and pummelling grind machine. "Cursed Eternity" goes for the mystique through some atmospheric chords and melodies, though the song is still sentenced to shred flesh with some bombastic faster rhythms. "Incineration of Mortal Flesh" lunges forward at a lopsided groove, like a bulldozer through a graveyard, unaware of what it just stirred up. "Nex Monumentum" offers some brief acoustics and somber collapsing melodies before transforming into what might be the best song on the album. The closer "Among the Exiled" creates atmosphere with dark ambience before corroding all arteries with its aural warfare grooves.

I have to admit I was truly impressed here. This is assured to darken all skies to gray if not the blackest of nights. The album captures and maintains the grim aesthetics of earlier death metal, where brutality was delivered through simple punishment and a sincere, squirming hatred. This should appease any fan of the retro wave of death metal, and it's combination of influences and crushing production should score them some recognition beyond that niche. One of the best new US bands I've heard lately in the vein of roots death metal which is proud to wear the name, far superior to the noodly spastic tech shit so many bands are phoning in to impress their girlfriends and combat their attention defecit disorders.

Only death is real.

-autothrall
http://www.fromthedustreturned.com

With the current state of death metal, faith is being lost in American bands. Reopening old wounds, new scars appear with Funebrarum, casting down the virgin masses of weak death-core, inviting haunting images from the past to permeate the US scene. It’s exactly how this American testament to Swedish death metal should be described, as it’s a fresh take on an old genre. On “The Sleep of Morbid Dreams,” a tale of godforsaken gore and afterlife annihilation is woven with old school death metal string that’s been sitting on the shelf for over eight years. “Beneath the Columns of Abandoned Gods” saw them ghoulishly active and forming almost a decade ago and since then they’ve become a cult sensation. Brought back from the dead, Funebrarum are here to drink deep of your blood with their second album of sadomasochistic death metal.

“Perish Beneath” and “Grave Reaper” start things off in total bludgeoning blasphemy. It’s not as lively as the rest of the album, but has enough low-tuned notes to get things moving from the hard-hitting musicianship. Then, “Beyond Recognition” and “Cursed Eternity” ensure a bar-gripping ride straight through the Swedish extreme metal scene, circa 1988. Daryl Kahan’s vocals sound like Dying Fetus meets Morbid Angel. The music can probably also be described in somewhat of the same way, especially prevalent on “Among the Exiled.” It has that brutal death power, but doesn't sound cheesy or boring. The music is frenetic like “Altars of Madness,” but has its moments of “Domination” down-time.

A track like “Nex Momentum” stands tall at about eight and a half minutes of victimizing virtuosos. Amongst the trendy young bands, something like this would scream “filler bluesy scales! Filler bluesy scales!” Funebrarum shell out ammunition of another kind, though; bigger and more blasting. “Nex Momentum” can be summed up in two words; crushingly eighties.

The one downfall of Funebrarum is that their music doesn’t come off as being all too original to many. They’re definitely not a copycat band, but shouldn’t have waited so long to release the new album, as it seems, other acts have beat them to the punch. While the approach is nothing new, that old saying “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” applies here. You’re might not be getting anything you haven’t heard before on “The Sleep of Morbid Dreams,” but if this is your genre, I guarantee you enjoyed it when you heard it and will enjoy it yet again with Funebrarum.

- Written for Tanin'iver Zine

So here we are, eight years after their mighty ‘Beneath the Columns of Abandoned Gods’ album/demo. At first that may seem somewhat scary, as eight years is more then enough time for a band to start sucking, but luckily this is not the case here. Although this album isn’t quite as archaic and dismal-sounding as the first, the brutality has not been lost at all, despite adding some refinements and new elements to their sound.

Much like ‘Beneath the Columns...’, the production on here is extremely well done and is very, very suiting. While the aforementioned album called for a more cavernous, eerie production job, ‘The Sleep of Morbid Dreams’ demands a full-blown, kick-you-in-the-liver type of deal, which is precisely what it is given. I also want to mention that the “pingy”-sounding snare drum on the first album is also gone, which, in my eyes, is most definitely a plus (Lord, do I fucking hate overly-pingy snare drums). Everything is leveled properly and each instrument is given enough room for the others to be heard just as clearly. This of course is all done with a thin caking of filth on top of it, so it retains the old school feel the production gave the first LP.

Although Funebrarum have never been ones to continuously blast everything into smithereens with speed, they’ve certainly kicked it up a notch on here. Where as the majority of ‘Beneath...’ was at a slow to mid-paced tempo, it is actually mixed up a bit more on here, incorporating more blasting and thrash gallop rhythms. This also works better on here then it would have on ‘Beneath...’ because the new drummer is clearly more capable of fusing speed and brutality with precision and accuracy. This precision also gives the slower sections even more power then before, which is where Funebrarum’s mastery really lays.

Daryl Kahan’s vocals have also gone through a significant change. Although he throws in some of his old bowel-bursting guttural grunts on occasion, the majority of the album finds him utilizing a higher register, but also with a bigger range, so it is not necessarily a negative alteration. The riffing however, is just as monstrous and brutal as before, with tunings that surely reach the seventh layer of Hell, bringing bands such as Crematory (Swe) and Rottrevore to mind. But this time, there are more Swedish-minded twisted harmonies as well as some new tricks they hadn’t used before. Complimenting these wretched riffs are some of the ugliest, most muculent, and rot-ridden sounding guitar and bass tones to have ever oozed out of my speakers, and give classics such as ‘Left Hand Path’ and ‘Dark Recollections’ a run for their money.

As the case always is with Funebrarum, this is nothing but ancient-sounding old school death metal draped in putridity and soaked in filth, but executed in a masterful way that only Funebrarum could do so well. They really are one of the best modern-day old school death metal bands, and this album will surely please all those into death metal from its glory days. As I said, it doesn’t quite reach the level of darkness attained on ‘Beneath the Columns of Abandoned Gods’, but it gets pretty god damn close, and makes up for it with its sheer brutality. Recommended.