Review Summary: Heavy and surefooted fifth album from Welsh mainstays
Bands - or at least the good ones - eventually reach a point where they begin to sound like no-one but themselves. It sounds silly to say but there's no higher compliment than this: the fifth Funeral For A Friend album sounds exactly like a Funeral For A Friend album. And that is something you only get with confidence.
Front Row Seats To The End Of The World - a punk song that ranks among the band's heaviest moments but still keeps the essential Funeral For A Friend sound in the catchy chorus, and the metal of Broken Foundation will delight those who have long awaited a return of the bands occasional anger. And Welcome Home Armageddon, in it's environmental and socio-political wrath, is nothing if not an angry, heavy album. But there's purity here too, best emphasised by Matt Davies-Kreye's voice and his unerring location of a tune. Owls (Are Watching), for example, delivers an almost perfect Funeral For A Friend moment as it nears it's conclusion. Over Kris Coombs-Roberts' fluent guitar, Matt euphoric melody underlines a point about ecological hypocrisy, encapsulating all that's good about the band in one middle-eight. Elsewhere there are things we haven't heard before, not least the amazing guitar riff during the bridge of Sixteen, which could have come straight of a Def Leppard album. There are still moments that echo a pop sensibility, for example Medicated could have been taken straight out of Memory & Humanity, but at least it is not the whole album and mixed in with the heavier songs it is actually a nice relief song towards the end, that is pleasant and has a killer chorus.
Funeral For A Friend records can often be seen as reactions to their predecessors. Hours eschewed the personal heartache that formed their Casually Dressed & Deep In Conversation debut, Tales Don't Tell Themselves expanded Hours' grounded realism into intricate concepts and major label breadth, but lacked fight and passion. Memory & Humanity was a home grown affair, and a response to their release from a major label, but was, perhaps transitional and unfocussed. It featured a guitarist, Darran Smith, who was shortly to leave, and a bassist, Gavin Burrough, who had only just joined. Welcome Home Armageddon's response to it is to sound confident: that melody/riff iron-fist/velvet-glove metal of old. The quirk is that it took the band's two new members Richard Boucher, installed on bass, and Gavin (now on guitar) to give the band the self-belief to once again be themselves. It is probably their most vital contribution.
After all of this the only problem, is that they have just travelled in a circle, we are back in 2003 with Myspace and Kill Bill and an album to build on and full of potential and hope, but judging on Conduit and Chapter & Verse, it is more of the same from a band that could and possibly can be so much more. But at least you can listen to this album and pretend it is 2011 and think about how positive the future can be.
