Mexico's answer to Abruptum? Yeah, pretty much, as this obscure black metal outfit from Mexico has been playing a similiarly fucked-up, improvised mutation of black metal as that of the Swedish improv-black metal weirdos. Funeral Moon has been around since 1993 but they've only been known to a handful of necro-trogs in the black metal underground due to the difficulty of tracking down Funeral Moon's recordings and the fact that underground metal from south of the U.S. border is usually ignored here in the States. This amazing new disc from Autopsy Kitchen seeks to remedy the situation and actually combines two seperate releases from Funeral Moon into one for a heavy dosage of bizarro black metal abstraction, which I have been playing virtually non-stop since this came in last week. The disc combines Funeral Moon's long out of print 1996 vinyl only LP Grim...Evil... with an unreleased collection of new songs titled Satan's Beauty Obscenity, which actually starts this off. These four new tracks are weird and unsettling blats of shambling blackness that move from grim, crude black metal to creepy dark ambience, 80's horror movie keyboards, odd electronic noises, and sardonic spoken-word peices dealing with Satanic ritual thought performed over weird synthesizer pieces; you can hear the influence of early black metallers like Burzum whenever the former appears, but the demented, stumbling riffing and atonal ambience that make up most of this stuff is pure Abruptum, albeit with FM's own fucked-up vision. The opening track "The Last Prophecy" starts the disc off with a spoken word piece enshrouded by dismal droning synths and strange vocoder voices, then shifts abruptly into the thrashing low-fi skuzz of "Black Sphere", it's mutoid black metal smeared with robotic screeching and strange, almost synthetic-sounding guitars. The last two of the newer recordings are slower and creepier, lumbering through deformed blackened riffage and more of FM's trademark satanic funhouse atmosphere.

The Grim...Evil... material is generally along the same lines, but the recording is even more wrecked and low-fi, the guitars rendered as a mosquito hum over distant, muffled drums and a thick veneer of shit and blood, while vocalist Impure Ehiyeh croaks his obsceneties in a hateful spew over the rush of primitive, hideous buzz. The filthy, diseased sounding guitar tone and hellish atmosphere gives this early recording a nasty vibe that recalls the out of control chaos of early Beherit as much as the formless dungeon skum of Abruptum.

Man, this is some top notch outsider black metal/ambient that fans of weird BM will love - it's amazing that these recordings have been hidden for so long. If you're a fan of the weirder, more abstract end of black metal like Abruptum, Beherit, Nordvargr, and Subliminal Murder, check this out.