Review & Track Premiere: The Crooked Whispers, Funeral Blues
[Click play above to stream ‘Suicidal Castle’ from The Crooked Whispers’ Funeral Blues LP. Album is out April 7 on Ripple Music. Preorders available here (US), here (EU) and here on Bandcamp.]
It is not so terribly long into The Crooked Whispers‘ second album, Funeral Blues — as opposed to Mark Lanegan‘s Blues Funeral; different vibe — before vocalist Anthony Gaglia delivers the lead-in line near the end of the opener streaming above: “Welcome to the suicide castle,” and that’s one of a few lyrics spread throughout from which the general point of view of the record might be extrapolated. See also: “You can’t escape from funeral blues,” in “Funeral Blues,” “Once you’ve seen both sides of life you’ll beg for death,” in “When Nothing is Left,” and, “Your god’s full of shit,” in the penultimate “Pleasant Death.” Especially as gurgled in the harsh, throaty sludge-scream delivery that populates most of the eight-song/41-minute procession, these lines tell you much about the bitter misanthropy at root in where The Crooked Whispers are coming from as they follow-up their widely-lauded 2020 debut, Satanic Melodies (review here).
As one might expect, there have been some changes in the band since 2020. The multinational four-piece, with bassist/backing vocalist/keyboardist Ignacio de Tommaso and drummer Nicolás Taranto based in Argentina and Gaglia (also of LáGoon) in Portland, Oregon, bid farewell to their San Francisco contingent with the departure of guitarist Chad Davis after 2021’s Dead Moon Night EP (review here), having signed to Ripple Music at the behest of Rob “Blasko” Nicholson (bassist for Ozzy Osbourne, Drown, Rob Zombie, etc.) and brought in guitarist/keyboardist Federico Ramos (ex-Dragonauta, Avernal) for late 2022’s split with Fulanno, Last Call From Hell! (review here).
They continue forward on this second long-player with de Tommaso helming production — which in this case includes putting together remotely-recorded parts as well as the usual working a board — and mixing and mastering alongside Marcelo Suraniti for a sound that’s full and weighted enough to give a sense of depth but still raw in a way that speaks to the sludge lurching beneath the cultish doom lurch of much of the material.
“Suicidal Castle” gives a whole-album intro for its first minute and a half or so (it’s actually 1:23, but who’s counting?) with a reinterpretation of the bridge to Nirvana‘s “In Bloom” that shifts into the first decisive roll for its verse, Gaglia‘s throaty rasp possessing character and bite in kind. It’s not a metal scream, but harsh just the same and rife with fuckall that bleeds into the generally grim atmosphere of what follows as “Stay in Hell” picks up from the quick fade of the leadoff and starts its own march, a cleaner incantation overtop working to establish the range in which much of Funeral Blues will dwell as it wood-handle-knife-carves its niche between crust-sludge, traditional doom, heavy cult rock, and so on, luring the listener further along a bleak course into the aforementioned title-track, which layers backing vocals in its middle third in another, more subtle, shift in approach as the structure likewise turns more linear.
Side A’s four songs are slightly shorter when taken as an entirety than side B’s, but the feeling of being pulled deeper into some shapeless hateful murk is palpable as the six-minute “When Nothing is Left” stands tall to announce its arrival at what is so far the lowest point The Crooked Whispers have gone. Its riff is the master of the dense fog in which the audience lands and resides, the looming peril of being stabbed never too far off as they revel in the extremity at their foundation even as they translate it into a deceptively accessible doomer nod. Side B, meanwhile, is even more down to the business of duggery as “Deathmaker” slams at the start and is quickly into its verse, which is harsh enough to make you want to read up on vocal cord nodules, even as cleaner lines are layered in again; stoned, dead, ugh. Just ugh. Righteously ugh.
Less of a march than its counterpart in “Suicidal Castle,” “Deathmaker” is duly bloodthirsty and malignant, and as the slower “Crippled Shadow” follows — a nadir as regards tempo — the overarchingly wretched spirit is at perhaps its most visceral. If Gaglia was going on about weed, you’d say it sounded like Bongzilla, but The Crooked Whispers are in darker thematic places, exclusively, and the held-out guitar of “Crippled Shadow” at the end of the verse lines past the three-minute mark is no less destructive than the lyrics.
There’s a big crash a minute later, and something of a kick for pace, but by this time, the band have made their intentions clear. Side A dug the whole, side B is where you’re buried alive, and if you want to think of that lurching riff at the finish of “Crippled Shadow” and the noisy cap they give the song as them tossing dirt down by the shovelful, that’s probably fair. It grooves, make no mistake. You can follow a course of riffs from front to back if you want and try and go that way, but these guys aren’t in the habit of making it easy, and many who pit their tolerance for extreme doom and sludge against Funeral Blues will find themselves bested long before the nihilism and churning violence of “Pleasant Death” arrives to put out any remaining vestiges of light.
Not there were any.
That makes the sweep-in guitar and this-is-gonna-be-the-riff-and-we’re-gonna-ride-it broadcasting of intention at the outset of closer and longest track “Bed of Bones” something of a victory lap on the band’s part, but it’s hard to begrudge them the win when what they’ve won at is so willfully disgusting. Murder fantasies persist through a crawler verse, and there’s either a sample or a spoken part as it plods into the midsection, setting up the next verse with a “hail Satan” that really says it all. They move into the last slog with more extreme vocals and a duly horrific organ-laced march that ends on a long fade, as though the one thing they forgot to tell you when they got underway was that the ‘funeral’ in Funeral Blues was going to be yours. Also they’re playing in your blood. That’s probably going to stain.
The Crooked Whispers have a sound that is well and truly fucked. And rather than dig into the genre-standard VHS-era Hammer Films grain, they skip the bullshit and go all-out in their grueling assault, full in tone and threat alike. I’m not saying they’re about to for-real-life wear your face like a mask, etc., but their sound certainly hones in on a fascination with death and Satanic malevolence, and if you think you can get down with that, there might just be a bit of catharsis in Funeral Blues. But if and when you start hearing voices, you might want to consider taking a break. Funeral Blues is multi-level brutality, actively working toward “not for everyone” as a central goal. To be sure, they get there.
The Crooked Whispers, Funeral Blues (2023)
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