Band:	HellLight
Album:	Funeral Doom
Style:	Death metal, Funeral doom metal
Release date:	May 2008

Disc I
01. Deep Siderial Silence
02. Funeral Doom
03. Nexus Alma
04. The Diary
05. Life In Darkness [re-recorded version]
06. Afterlife [re-recorded version]
07. In Memory Of The Old Spirits [re-recorded version]

Disc II [2012 re-release bonus] [The Light That Brought Darkness]
01. The Light That Brought Darkness
02. Heaven And Hell [Black Sabbath cover]
03. How The Gods Kill [Danzig cover]
04. Hey Hey My My [Neil Young cover]
05. Comfortably Numb [Pink Floyd cover]
06. Man Of Iron [Bathory cover]
07. The Show Must Go On [Queen cover]

Hey hey my my. Doom can never die? Huh. Never thought I'd hear an extreme doom band singing about Johnny Rotten of the Sex Pistols.

So back to the beginning. Solitude Productions recently re-released HellLight's 2008 release Funeral Doom, originally printed in a now sold-out limited run, packaging it with The Light That Brought Darkness mini album. The mini album features the new title track along with a bunch of doomed-up covers.

For sake of brevity, I'm going to gloss over the re-release a bit. In 2010 the band put out ?And Then, The Light Of Consciousness Became Hell?, which was reviewed by your truly. In order to get to the more interesting stuff, suffice it to say Funeral Doom contains less well constructed and executed songs in the style of their later release. They got better over the ensuing two years, thus making the 2010 release with the ridiculous title a better place to start.

So that leaves the mini album. (Nothing mini about the length, it's almost an hour of music.)

The new opening track shows the same degree of improvement that the band exhibited between Funeral Doom and their 2010 album whose name I refuse to type again. The track is very promising, going through the similar phases and exhibiting the same characteristics I would expect? dark, miserable doom with growled vocals, crushing riffs, and hell-lighting ambience courtesy of some keyboards. They even close "The Light That Brought Darkness" out DragonForce style? with a two minute solo. Nicely done, it shows they are even more refined and it makes me hopeful for their next release.

Finally the covers. Oh my. For starters, it was pretty cool to see an extreme doom act perform doomed-down covers of other metal and rock songs. It was certainly intriguing. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. While the music is interesting, particularly Neil Young's "Hey Hey My My" and Pink Floyd's "Comfortably Numb, the biggest criticism of their prior release was the clean vocals. In the band's natural environment they were used sparingly (and fortunately given the response to the prior review) and they now become the focus.

Dio, Danzig, and David (Gilmour, just wanted to keep the frontman alliteration thing going) are charismatic and great vocalists in their own right, making the comparison not particularly favorable. At times they were passable but at other times flat out awkward.

Still, the tracks make for an intriguing listen, especially because they are pulling from so far out of the band's element. Better a funeral doom act attempting to cover Pink Floyd in some blend of styles rather than just tweaking another song by a far more similar band.

The covers are worth checking out, and if that draws your attention to the band's own material, so much the better.