Where do you even start with a release like this? The press release summarises the package’s contents, and it’s exactly as the title suggests:
‘The Total Funeral discography boasts over an hour-and-a-half of carnage with fifty-three tracks in total, including the Harvester Of Death, Make Noise Not War, D-Beat Noise Attack, The Face of War, Make A Change, Gröndalen, In League With Darkness and Order From Disorder releases, the split with Go Filth Go, and even several previously-unreleased and new/unreleased tracks.’
Best of all? Here’s the clincher: it comes as ‘a massive blood red/beer stained 2LP package’. Working from a digital promo, I can’t confirm if those are real beer stains, so shall focus on the music instead, while sipping a beer and trying not to spill in on my keyboard as I tremble at the sonic assault.
The cymbals dominate the wall-of-noise frenzy that is ‘Harvester of Death’, which occupies the first five tracks here. Somewhere under that crashing mess of noise, there are squalid, trebled-to-fuck guitars, a relentless bass and vocals that sound like the guys tearing round the studio with his entrails hanging out. Bordering on the unlistenable, it’s a ferociously frenzied assault, brutal, primal, not so much underproduced as unproduced, mercilessly raw and visceral.
The obvious narrative would be that the collection traces a trajectory of increasingly commercial material, the band refining their sound and polishing up the production. But the tsunami of feedback that launches ‘Make Noise Not War’ makes it clear that’s not the story here. In fact, it’s hard to tell if there’s much progression between releases, because whatever music there may be is all but buried in a violent mesh of treble as the band thrash everything into oblivion at a speed that would leave lightning outpaced. Any notion of accessibility is obliterated with malevolent sonic detonations like ‘Worldwide Genocide’ and ‘Chemical Lobotomy’, and by the time side one of the double vinyl hits the play-off groove, the sensation is very much as one may expect such surgery to feel.
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‘D Beat Noise Attack’ does what it says on the tin, as they say, and ‘Make a Face’ features songs with titles like ‘Consuming Shit’ and ‘Raped System’, and sounds exactly as you’d expect: no false advertising here.
Of course it’s niche, and of course it’s seriously nasty. Electric Funeral are the antithesis of, well, more or less anything musical or civilised.
Electric Funeral Online
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