Day: May 20, 2017

Russian musician Nikolay Seredov has been on the scene for about a decade now with his solo project called Funeral Tears. Obviously, such a moniker leaves very few doubts about the chosen genre, which can only be a painful and melancholic funeral death doom, and in these cases the only discriminating factor compared to many other realities of the same tenor is the competence in the approach to the genre. Beyond The Horizon is the third full length that, after good but still slightly unripe works such as Your Life My Death (2010) and The World We Lost (2014), elevates Nikolay’s creature to a definitely higher status: in fact, in the album, everything works for the best, starting from an excellent sound performance, the ideal base on which to build a sound that oscillates between funeral and melodic death doom, with some episodes of ambient. In almost an hour, the Tomsk musician succeeds in conveying with great compositional property the various sources of inspiration that go to make up this beautiful sonic monolith of pure and melancholic pain: clearly everything is aimed at that niche of listeners who greedily feed on these sounds and who will be amply rewarded, for example, by two magnificent tracks like Breathe and the final and poignant Eternal Tranquillity. In Beyond The Horizon the vocals are very good, usually consisting of a deep growl that, however, occasionally crosses over into a harsh scream, and also the guitar textures appear convincing, linear but with the necessary emotional impact: Funeral Tears offer all the ingredients capable of making an album of such characteristics something very similar to a dizzying descent, with no possibility of return, into the whirlpools of the human psyche.

2017 – Satanath Records