Funeral Whore, Step Into Damnation

Brutal and one dimensional it no way to go through life, right? Well, Funeral Whore may take some issue with that statement. Their fist full slab of OSDM (after several demos, a split and an EP) is as voraciously single minded as you can get. Thundering, doomy grooves are matched with old school buzzing guitars from the first track until the finale. Tempos shift on every song, but when every song has the same tempo shifts, things can get monotonous.

That all said, Step Into Damnation is a faithful homage to the the bands of my youth. Think Autopsy, Cianide and even the one-release Disincarnate (Dreams of the Carrion Kind is still an awesome album to this day) and you’ve pretty much got Funeral Whore’s number. Is it complete aping on their part? No, not really. They bludgeon their way through solid riffs and barbaric rhythms nicely. I would just like a little more variation amongst the crushing death metal they sling.

I’d like to pinpoint a couple of stand out tracks, but to tell you the truth, they are all pretty solid — a little messy here and there, but for the most part they are all decent jams. The problem, as already stated above, is that after the fourth or fifth track we’ve already heard what’s presented on the remaining half of the album. Step Into Damnation certainly makes me reminisce about the early nineties as I was cutting my teeth on cassettes from Cancer, Pestilence and the likes and that does this rotten heart good. But man, let’s throw a curve ball in there guys.

So, if you’re in the mood for a throw-back album with a full and dense sound that will remind you of death metal’s heyday then this is the disc for you, as long as you don’t mind having it on in the background while you focus on something else. At least the album shows some promise as to what we may expect from Funeral Whore in the future.