Review Summary: The Norwegian [insert your ideas on their genre] band give an excellent sophomore performance in their forgotten Funeral Beach.
If someone had told me about a pop/punk/rock/metal band, it wouldn’t have been hard for me to think that their music would be a messy muddle of loads of different conflicting ideas. But somehow, Blood Command pull it off excellently. My assumptions would be very, very wrong. Their 2012 sophomore
Funeral Beach was all but forgotten, a disappointment given its contents.
From the first track here, “Pissed Off and Slightly Offended!” they manage to get across exactly what they are. A slow, rock-like introduction followed by metal, harsh verses to the half-melodic pop-like chorus, with brilliant, if not the most complex riffing and drumming, gives a perfect track to tell everyone that Blood Command are something to not be dismissed.
Their heavy tracks avoid sounding like a basic -core subgenre, which can happen when you mix heavier and lighter genres together. “Cult of the New Beat” is fast and carries itself along with its own momentum, with a strong sense of rhythm and beat that makes you tap along through the heavy and light bits alike. Their propensity for heavy verses and lighter choruses, something that can be tiring, is switched up as the lead vocalist, Silje Tombre, slowly becomes harsher throughout the song, overdubbing herself with backing to change each chorus slightly. Tombre has an excellent-sounding clean and harsh voice, through all tracks able to show emotion, using her better-than-average range where needed (see parts of “Wolves At The Door” for higher vocals, and also the best two-minute track I’ve ever heard).
The vocals and genre-mashing are not the only impressive thing here, as “Death To All But Us!” gives a complex drum beat, with odd time signatures mixed in, while maintaining a memorable riff. It’s a stand out track in that regard, and sadly the changing time signatures do not return (unless I have completely missed something here). On the title track, 6-and-a-half minutes long, they take a more progressive turn, with another complex drum beat and riffing. I particularly like the outro, which amounts to a repeated two-bar section on drums and guitar, with another guitar doing a solo over the top. It shows their musicianship very well, but would not stand against any number of other bands who also do progressive-leaning tracks.
A personal favourite of mine is “Here Next To Murderous”. The groove that starts right from the first millisecond, the well-suited clean vocals, an excellent hook of “I am the law/I’m on my way/To watch a beautiful soul decay…” giving a good enough story, not demanding too much thinking, but also not giving everything away. It’s matched by the heavier, harsher “Oceans Inside Neptune” which has the same level of groove, the riff going through my head even before it actually kicks in properly. It feels breakneck without being breakneck, and has another of many choruses that just screams for head-nodding. Asides from “True North”, which I still can’t like, that last half of the album, from “Murderous” is constantly and excellently maintained. The two ‘halves’ are broken by “High Five For Life”, which feels like a bit of a juxtaposition to some of the other songs. It’s Paramore-like, and I’m not quite sure they pull it off well. It’s short, luckily, but when you have “Murderous” and “Wolves” on either side of you, you’d better be excellent, and “High Five” is not excellent.
Funeral Beach an imperfect album, but when it’s good, it’s excellent. It’s a showcase of a band who know how to write music in different genres. That comes across in the feeling of the album. I would say it is definitely a ‘shuffle-ready’ album. Some albums have a string that makes them have a clear order, and this feels very much like a singles album. There’s nothing wrong about that, but having that string gives an album direction, and this feels slightly arbitrary on occasion. But nevertheless, it's a good album that was buried 6 years ago when it released.
