Band:	Funerary
Album:	Starless Aeon
Style:	Funeral doom metal
Release date:	August 14, 2014
A review by:	Doc G.

01. Coerced Creation
02. Untitled
03. Beneath The Black Veil
04. Starless Aeon
05. Depressor

How the hell do you judge an album like this? It's so good, yet simultaneously flat and deflated. Welcome to Starless Aeon... an album of amazing atmosphere built through cavernous production, yet somehow is just irritatingly substance-less.

Starless Aeon is strikingly similar to playing drunk billiards: You could have all the perfect shots lined up to really clean house, trick the ladies at the bar into thinking you're cool, and win some money...but somehow you come up frustratingly short and wind up home alone with an empty wallet and vomit on your shoes. Funerary have an ear for atmosphere, they've built that up amazingly. Everything from guitar tones and effects to layering and production is thoughtfully put together. The guitars have just the right dash heaping of distortion, the vocals are disgusting underlying screams and grunts drifting through the background, topped off with those haunting sustained tones cutting in and out of the mix.

Yes, Starless Aeon is a beautifully hideous sludge-doom beast that hits all the right spots...Yet somehow the whole thing falls a little flat in a lot of places. There's no sense of progression from song to song, no climax's, no real sense of purpose to a good majority of the album. Both "Untitled" and the title track are the pinnacle of filthy, dark atmosphere and ambiance, but it's not until the final track "Depressor" that everything comes together cohesively. As good as Starless Aeon is for each of its individual components, the fact that you don't get a full sense of what's going on until the final track is what keeps it from being anything truly interesting.

Sludge/doom fans should certainly give this one a shot. While it certainly does lack direction, at the very least it should make fantastic background music.