None Of This Was Supposed to Happen – Funeral Language (reviewed by The Night Writer)

Sometimes it is helpful to describe a band’s sound by the musical map that gets you from here to there. So let’s make a point of departure rock music itself. You need to keep going until you find yourself in metal territory, head further along until the sonic landscape begins to look blasted and cavernous and the band logos have become indecipherable, and then forge further on until even the first two circles of hell can be seen in the rearview mirror. Turn left, at the point where you see the influencers, politicians and bedroom mumble rap artists being culled and crucified, and you will find the studio where Funeral Language make their music.

None of This Was Supposed to Happen is not for the faint-hearted; it represents a relatively extreme end of the metal spectrum, a place where a tsunami of kick drum beats, grinding bass and industrial riffs all unite to form a platform for howling, hell-spawned vocals that lean more into the form of a brutish sonic instrument rather than a discernible means of communication.

On songs such as Bloodbath, melodies are turned into squalling gales driven by grating guitars and thunderous otherworldly energies. The whole thing sounds like Armageddon itself…as in the end of times, not the British psychedelic supergroup of the 70s.

But proving that the band are totally in control and their voyages of excess are a music choice, Symptom is an interlaced web of symphonic guitars and drums that ebb and flow rather than crash and collide. Similarly, Imminent Collapse is a spiralling epic, coiled and climbing ever upwards towards sonic crescendoes. The Slaughter is a dark and delicious grind of heavy grooves and otherworldly sonics, wandering between relative understatement and sonic onslaught.

And all this tells us that, far from being a mass of mayhem and a salvo of sonic destruction, Funeral Language deftly select the various elements of their songs to match their wants. Sure, they are all brutal and heavy to some degree or another, but once you get your ear tuned, you can hear the various forces at play, the balance of power between the musical elements. These creative collisions turn everything into more than the sum of its parts.

This is an album built on power but also exhibits poise. There is muscle on display but also melody. There is groove afoot, albeit often unrelenting in nature. It might sit at the more extreme end of the spectrum, but there is also accessibility here, especially if you like music which is wild enough to seem out of control but played by musicians who know just how to reign things in a second or two before it plunges into oblivion.

Play at Apple Music