Profetus - ...to Open the Passages in Dusk
Funeral Doom, when done right, can be the most powerful style of music on the planet. Seemingly heavy-hearted since birth, it’s difficult for me to think of a band that has occupied my stereo more often than Shape of Despair over the last decade. However, when done incorrectly, Funeral Doom can also be the most boring thing imaginable. Finnish quartet Profetus have not yet discovered the secret to creating meaningful Funeral Doom, as …to Open the Passages in Dusk fails to captivate on any level. If all it took was to play at an inhumanly slow pace, they’d be in business, as play inhumanly slow they do. But that isn’t all it takes. To play at this (complete lack of) speed presents an enormous canvas. An enormous canvas that must be filled delicately and creatively with all of life’s pain and then some. The crushing weight of sorrow, loss and dejection must carry the art, with the denial of all hope as borders. Only then can the beauty of human suffering emanate from the density. Profetus’ indiscernibly uneventful compositions go nowhere slow. Waves of tediously uninteresting chord progressions rise and fall with no life, never reaching apex, never even gathering momentum, all the while guided by an equally painless organ. Anssi Mäkinen has an adequate dull roar —effective, if only by comparison to his tepid spoken bits— but, just like the music, it’s all too content to trudge anticlimactically through cyclical monotony. The clean singing on “Burn, Lanterns of Eve” isn’t very good, but at least it woke me up. Truth is, there isn’t a Doom growl bestial enough, nor a singing voice with enough passion and grace to save this hour-long descent into insubstantiality. Profetus do have some of the tools and could improve, but no Funeral Doom band can come to my pity party unless they remember to bring the pain.
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