Month: January 2018

The Dutch Faal belong to a scene that, in the funeral death doom sphere, counts on an established tradition. The last release of the band from Breda dates back to 2015, when it occupied the second half of a split album in the company of Eye Of Solitude. The song offered on that occasion, Shattered Hope, was quite representative of the sound of Faal, a band that, although fully ascribable within the melodic funeral, does not give up to propose more robust and harsh cues, making certainly less predictable the proposal. However, the fulcrum of the work remains the sorrowful harmonies that Faal, never as this time, are able to make in the best way, wrapping the listener in a cloak of sadness that never flows into despair, leaving room for a melancholy that is sublimated in a magnificent song like Grief. No Silence, on the other hand, is a clear example of what the Dutch band is able to do when it increases the engine revs, keeping the tension high and without losing the melodic component that will be our faithful companion until the end of Desolate Grief: it’s beautiful in this track (close to ten minutes as well as the other three, excluding the intro) the guitar work that punctuates first a remarkable emotional crescendo and then lets go to those funeral litanies, that so much love the fans of the genre. A good but less intense (despite the title) Evoking Emotions acts as a buffer before the worthy conclusion of the album with The Horizon, with the growl of William Nijhof that makes even the speakers vibrate, while peeps welcome shades post metal that go to intertwine with deceptively slow rhythmics, since halfway through the song comes a rage that represents a last gasp, almost a reaction to the inescapable and painful descent into hell coinciding with the end of an excellent work, and that reinforces Faal’s status as a band of thickness and emblem of a coherent, effective and not obvious way to interpret the matter funeral death doom.

2018 – Ván Records