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FUNERAL LEECH
The Illusion Of Time

Carbonized (2024)
Rating: 7.5/10

The sound of Funeral Leech is akin to spending a night in a coffin. Pitch black death-doom seeps from every crack as this New York City combo creeps through the dank corridors of your mind and unsettles your psyche with every slithering mass of blackness. Tones of Incantation exude from each and every pore, the result being a damp blanket of suffocating misery and despair as cold chords vibrate from the abysmal abyss.

Although the funereal doom lethargy is sporadic, the overall feel is of that cavernous ilk we’ve become accustomed to from a plethora of bands over the last few decades, particularly on album closer ‘The Tower’. Even so, Funeral Leech for the most part exists just above the levels of mid-paced drudgery, chilling the listener with constant miasmic draughts of ill wind and foggy sediment. The riffs are grime-caked walls so thick that it is a struggle to breathe within their confines.

‘Penance’ is (im)pure Incantation, a volcanic brew of sticky silt, hot ash and grit, and while there is little variation throughout this beast of a composition, drummer Lucas Anderson keeps us teetering on the edge of the yawning chasm with his foul vocal bellows and equally inconsolable percussive thuds. Throughout the guitars moan like tormented swirling banshee mists melancholically cavorting in the gloom in tandem with the morbid bass rumbles. It’s subterranean death metal as common as muck but Funeral Leech does just about enough to separate themselves from the all too familiar, and, dare I say, cosy plateaus that a majority of current death metal acts occupy.

Yep, the songs do feel overlong, but I believe that’s the sinister plan of the band as they drag you down to their horrid levels, so be prepared for the long haul into those crushing depths that are created somewhere between Paradise Lost’s Gothic (1991) and Incantation’s Onwards To Golgotha (1992).

Neil Arnold

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