This killer 12" from Canadian black industrial master Funerary Call features material recorded in the mid-90s but was just recently resurrected on limited edition vinyl by Nuclear War Now, which I'm getting in stock now for the first time. I've already gushed immensely about my love of Funerary Call's music when writing up the re-issued discs that came out on Fall Of Nature and the upcoming new album Fragments From The Aethyr that just came out on Crucial Blast, but it still bears repeating: Funerary Call is one the key forerunners of the black industrial sound, a major influence on much of the music that I'm currently obsessed with. Harlow MacFarlane's mysterious project was one of the earliest proponents of experimenting with the boundaries between industrial and electronic music and black metal, and Funerary Call produced some seriously twisted stuff over the course of it's two decade existence.

Coming from the early part of Funerary Call's career, this six-song 12" is some of the heaviest material I've ever heard from the band, and is much more closely tied with the project roots in the Ross Bay black metal underground than the more ambient direction that much of MacFarlane's later work would take. Funerary Call was always aligned with the nail-studded maniacs in Conqueror and Blasphemy, and J. Reed from Conqueror/Revenge himself appears on Damnation's Journey, contributing a blasting drum performance and howling demonic vocals to several of the tracks. Beginning with "The Crown Has Fallen", the record creeps through abstract, ritualistic ambience littered with treated drum sounds, minimal synth drones and mangled guitar vomit, recitations from texts on devil-worship, eruptions of delirious chanting and feedback drift, doom-laden drums and bestial roaring. The sound of hell vomiting, a narcotic-laced descent into swirling graveyard chaos, leading up to the closing ambient piece that combines the sound of vomiting blood and lysergic chanting with lush kosmische drift.

Can't recommend this enough to fans of extreme blackened industrial and black "noise" metal. Comes on black vinyl and includes a printed insert.