Uruk-Hai / Funeral Fornication - Split (2010)

Since 1999, Hugin the mastermind behind Austrian battle ambient band Uruk-Hai has released an astonishing twenty five demos, thirty one split releases, fifteen full-length albums as well as several singles and best of compilations placing him as pretty much the most prolific music maker out there. You'd need some serious loot to own all of these recordings.

Personally my first experience with Uruk-Hai was about four years ago when I came across his, 'The Battle' full-length at a second hand store, and a few years ago his split with Symbiosis appeared in my mailbox for review, but besides that I haven't heard any other releases.

This being his most recent release I can see that musically and conceptually (Tolkien/high fantasy stuff) not much has changed within Hugin's style, although the synths on this release surely do sound better than that album from five years ago. The music as I briefly mentioned is basically bombastic ambient/neo classical music with Hugin's screams and samples from the Lord of the Rings movies with the closest comparison being Polish project Blakagir. Of course not all of Hugin's material has been in this style as some records are more strictly neo classical in character while as I understand it the earliest material was cheap Casio/midi Burzum style ambient. In the end this is definitely the best of the three recordings I've heard from Uruk-Hai, but I suppose if you've followed the band in recent years then don't expect anything different here.

After the fourth song we move onto Funeral Fornication, which is the solo project of Vultyrous from Victoria, British Columbia, Canada. Although initiated as a thrash/black metal project back in 2003 with two albums under his belt, by 2008 Vultyrous took his music within the realm of depressive black metal and thus far released one album titled, 'Solitude and Suicide' with 'Pandemic Transgression' coming out in 2011 through Hypnotic Dirge Records.

I have no experience with any of Vultyrous' previous four albums, but one thing is for sure and that is quite simply that this is first rate depressive black metal music. What makes this work is simply the fact that it's depressive in character. The legions of other bands in this genre completely forget that depressing music needs atmosphere, it needs to be dark sounding, it needs to sound fucking depressing! As well personally I think this sort of music needs more than just a buzzing pulse for the guitar, but almost all bands within this genre opted for noise rather than riffs. Fortunately Vultyrous knows what he's doing as these four songs have synths that are drenched with a desperate misery of utter despair while the guitar work features various dark haunting riffs that only enhance the mood further plus the harsh screams sound like a soul truly in pain.

All four songs from FF are quite exceptional, though the unexpected sounding, 'Chamber Below the Abyss' stands out as a favorite since with the slow bass guitar work, light percussion, spoken voices and ghostly cemetery synths make it not really a metal song, but just simply an overwhelming atmospheric masterpiece.

In the end I'm quite satisfied with Funeral Fornication's songs on this split and greatly look forward to his next album, while Uruk-Hai is Uruk-Hai on this album. It's an interesting split, but perhaps its because of the highly different sounds that the whole thing works out.