So Slow It Feels Like Death: FUNERAL MOTH “Transience” Review + Stream

Funeral Moth are, in their own words, an “extreme doom” band from the Kanazawa Prefecture of Japan, and Transience is their second album, released earlier this year on Weird Truth Productions on CD and coming soon on Throne Records on LP (pre-order here). Like most things coming from Japan, especially in the extreme spectrum of things, if shit’s already weird and out there over here, in Japan the same aesthetics are usually taken to the next level of crazy, with every extreme aspect of the craft just taken to almost ridiculous new extremes.

So it is with Transience, and what makes this record so special is that it took an already extreme form of funeral – slow motion tormented doom – and made it even more extreme, even slower, more absurd, and more alienating than what one could bear, and overall just even more fucking insanely death-like. In these two massive movements of slow-moving sonic torture, you will be set up against an immeasurable hardship as you desperately try to crawl away from death and navigate yourself out of the black hole carved into your reality by Funeral Moth.

Their music sounds like a gaping void, like the open mouth of Hades, and it slowly slants reality, making everything drift towards it in an unescapable crumbling dirge, until everything finally is sucked into its death. The most insane thing about this band is that it takes interminable minutes for this whole sonic demise to happen. It’s like witnessing someone’s agonizing death at one millionth of normal speed. Of course, the music is grandiose and wildly crafted, full of incredible cleans and sustained haunting atmospheres, drooping and sadness-torn growls, blood-chilling funeral doom passages, and crushing sloth-like riffs. If you like shit like Mournful Congregation, Tyranny, Corrupted, Aldebaran, Loss, Thergoton,  Skepticism, and other similar void-filled and slow-moving sonic aberrations made with the sole objective to slowly drain you of all life, then you will fucking love Funeral Moth. Get ready for this pup to become the funeral doom album of the year – it will be hard to top in the next months.