Oulu's famous gloom metallers Sentenced decided to kill themselves. They recorded 'The Funeral Album' during the winter 2004 and played their final concert in October 2005. The band's diverse musical treats varied from death metal of the beginning to dark (heavy) metal of the middle of the career, and finally to dark hard rocking metal.

The band wanted to include their progress on 'The Funeral Album'. Main ingredient of the music is the last style fo the band, gloomy hard rocking metal (vocalist Ville Laihiala's other band Poisonblack and Charon are well-known examples of that). At best, the songs are very well rolling, damned catchy and generally flawless in their genre. 'May Today Become the Day' and 'Ever-Frost' are fine speedy songs that are on the list of "better Sentenced songs", easily. 'We Are but Falling Leaves' drops in pace, ending up as truly a wistful song. 'Her Last 5 Minutes' tops the previous with its trademark Finnish melancholy, also presenting some doomier stylings. As mentioned, the album includes earlier styles of the band, so there's even death metal, all bloody 58 seconds of it! 'Where Waters Fall Frozen' is the album's death metal piece, and not surprisingly, an instrumental one. It's simply totally out-of-place, being very much like 'North from Here's (1993) material. Western-style harmonica on 'Despair-Ridden Hearts' caused some raised eyebrows here, but the song is another hard rocking hit from the band. The rock goes on until 'A Long Way to Nowhere', which is the album's second limping song and the trend continues until 'Drain Me', the band's frankly rockiest kind of song ever. Acoustic plucking of 'Karu' is truly austere, the song title directly translated. 'End of the Road' with its everlasting, beautiful, so brisk ending lead guitar work is a great... errm, ending! Loppu, the end. Good bye and thank you for the fish. So, the album is new wave Sentenced, that's for sure, and wasn't a big surprise. The thing is that new wave Sentenced is straight rocking songs, there's not much left of that adventurous spirit that ruled on their earlier albums, especially on 'Amok' (1995). Some songs have enough of "it", the "ooomph", some don't (songs 8-11). What did you expect from the music written after (my guess) the decide to quit?

Mr. Lopakka's lyrics are partly awesome. I like the war song 'May Today...'s lively words, 'Ever-Frost's sarcastic style, but then it hits: Death, and later, suicide. Okay, 'We Are...' is a slow song, and the lyrics fit in, but... Us Finns, we like to sing about death and suiciding just like power metal bands wanna sing about dragons and heroes, so for me these are way too old news. 'Despair-Ridden Hearts' is about dying mankind, thanks to its self-destructiveness. Some of the lyrics are a bit naive, but there's also funny naive moments like "Beaten numb, I didn't see you sneaking 'round the corner, how could I? There is no sight in my third eye" from 'Vengeance...'. Frustration, suicide 'n' death topics can be found on songs 8 to 10, which are the musicwise the lame part of the album, too. Naughty 'Drain Me' has the worst ever Sentenced lyrics, easily. Booklet photography is very beautiful. The pictures from Northern Finland are simply amazing. Soundwise this is heavy, but also muffled in lower frequencies. Pretty much organic, except for the bass drums, which must have been triggered. It all feels kind of rushed. Mr. Laihiala really got better year after year with his deep-ish voice. "Baby Lemmy" was looong gone and a singer arose pretty much after 'Down' (1996).

The band released their best work, in my opinion, already in 1995. The band covered diverse styles of metal and that was both positive and negative thing. In my opinion Sentenced did well during all of their styles, more or less, but they did well. The death metal era wasn't groundbreaking, but others were, at least to some point. Anyway, three quarters of 'The Funeral Album' is good, partly excellent, but it feels that the eagerness of the band didn't last for the whole work. And the aforementioned adventurous spirit was lost years ago. A must for Sentenced fanatics, others will probably forget it pretty fast. It's just too "snacky", not "meaty". It might fill you up, but one fart and you're hungry again.

Rating: 6+ (out of 10) ratings explained

Reviewed by Lane
09/10/2008 20:29