Funeral Mist – Hekatomb (Review)

This is the third album from Swedish black metal act Funeral Mist.

Hekatomb is a one man band brought to us by the vocalist of Marduk.

Hold on tight, because Hekatomb is a whirlwind of savage destruction and creative intensity.

When you think of Funeral Mist, think of a sort of structured chaos, or a sort of coherent nightmare. Twisted and vitriolic, this is a massively unfriendly beast.

Creatively passionate and inventively diabolical, the music on this album is wrought with an iron soul and a fiery appetite for destruction. The music is violent and unusual, bladed and repulsive, yet still operates with a dark allure that’s undeniable.

The songs mix standard blackened elements with atypical arrangements and ideas, making for fascinating exemplars of imaginative black metal. This is music that combines the traditional with the avant-garde and the distinctly non-standard in such a way that you get the best of both worlds. Neither one extreme nor the other gets preferential treatment, which makes for a very satisfying and enjoyable listening experience as you try to navigate the labyrinthine nightmarescapes of Hekatomb.

Hekatomb is not simply any one thing. It’s a multifaceted monster of an album, containing all manner of influences, styles, and musical accoutrements, sometimes in a single song. Straightforward blistering aggression shares space with some punk-fuelled riffs, or maybe it’s a malignant groove which presages a more atmospheric section. Or what about some experimental wanderings around a free-form space?

Full of occult malevolence and sinister arcane mood, this is an album that crafts devastating effective movements through blackened rawness and expansive creativity. Suitably fettered by a core of hateful blackened extremity, Hekatomb strikes the perfect balance between traditional black metal and a more esoteric, individual strain of the blackened plague.

The vocals sound like they’re performed by about ten different singers, rather than just the one. The man is a vocal chameleon. Just as the music manages a certain balance between its various aspects, his voice manages to mix standard shouts, screams, and growls, with more unusual and esoteric deliveries in just the right amounts.

Hekatomb is an exceptional album of dark, vicious, black metal art.