Funebrarum - The Sleep of Morbid Dreams

Throwback trends in Metal are cute and everything, but usually these new bands are just sad bastardizations of the past.  So rarely do you find a new band that not only sounds authentic, but actually stands toe-to-toe with the old standards.  Funebrarum is such a band.  They're easily confuseable with the legitimately old Finnish band Funebre, but easily better.  Instead of just doing a cop-out by creating an intentionally dated aesthetic and writing low-brow cheesy lyrics, Funebrarum create their authenticity by duplicating the energy, emotion, and tone of those seminal recordings.

Enough of those vague descriptions, I'm sure you wanna know what this actually sounds like.  The Sleep of Morbid Dreams is very much in the early Swedish/Finnish style, with low-tuned guitars and a dark, cavernous production.  The guitars sound particularly great here, pitch-black tone with the perfect balance of fuzz and mudd.  The vocals are about as good as it gets in DM; fat and beastly, and still relatively intelligible.  I wish the drums were a little louder, as there's some fine skin-beating found throughout as well.  The whole band varies the pace regularly too, keeping every song sounding fresh until the end.  If you liked those Amorphis and Murder Squad albums I posted awhile ago, you need to hear this.

link by frownedupon RIP