I know that this is quite a ‘late’ response (date of release: about eight months ago) and it will be a short review, but then again: whatever???!!! This chronicle does deal with a new piece by Funeral Tears, which is a project by Nikolay Seredov, whom you might know as well from e.g. Taiga or Stakhanovite (стахановец). It’s a single ‘song’ this time, being released more than four years after the former official effort, The Last God On The Earth. I actually thought that this project sort of disbanded, but if you could see the huge smile on my pretty face, you would notice that… Whatever…
Let’s go to the content immediately. Kiss Me One Last Time is, as mentioned before, a digitally released single, which lasts for 9:04 minutes. I have no idea whether it will be part of a new upcoming album, but I’ll stick to this one right now (yet still hoping for new material, evidently). It sees the (un)light via the Armenian based (Funeral) Doom label Funere, related to the Satanath family, and run by (the beautiful damsel – please don’t excommunicate me for this, Aleksey) Jane Orpheus. She is not only the leading lady behind this label; Jane is involved with this specific release as well, for taking care of the lyrical concept (and modeling artwork) as well (once more).
You bury me alive / Leaving no choice / My house is now a grave / Woven from thousands of thorns / You thrust thorns into me, ruthlessly and accurately…
Like the title might unveil, Kiss Me One Last Time dwells within spheres of emotions, about loss and love, about anguish, affliction, sorrow. But it’s all about strength as well. The song starts quite heavy, depressed and oppressive, with fair yet grieving harmonies, slowly pounding drum patterns, deep grunts and mesmerizing harmonies, eventually evolving into comparable miserable melodies with acoustic additions and spoken voices. After about three minutes, an acoustic passage opens the portal towards another comparable elegy of sonic despair and aural grieving – mind these intriguing bass and acoustic guitar lines (besides the captivating vocals). The addition of piano and synths (cf. the last one-third of this piece) too are reminiscent to ‘the scene’, and so are, at that moment, the semi-spoken voices and acoustic strings.
Or, in short: Kiss Me One Last Time does not renew the scene (at all), but it collapses to the core-essence of whatever ‘Doom’ might get defined within its aural context – damn, what a try-out – let’s just stick to this: with this single, Funeral Tears caress the delicate skin of refined tristesse within its aural form
Kiss me one last time / You give me to the cold and damp earth / Don’t mourn for me / So they wanted / You bury me alive / Leaving to rot in the void…
https://funere.bandcamp.com/album/kiss-me-one-last-time
https://www.concreteweb.be/reviews/funeral-tears
https://www.concreteweb.be/reviews/poezd-rodina-funeral-tears