Mournful Congregation-The book of kings

20 Buck Spin
2011

I hear the label funeral doom and right away in conjures images of long, slow and bleak tracks. Australia's veteran act Mournful Congregation are funeral doom masters. Their songs are all of the above, but fortunately they involve so much more as well. Here we get four songs adding up to around 80 minutes of music. Although it's slow and requires patience on the part of the listener they never disappoint. Each song is a single entity, but also each song contains so many varied sounds winding along the way. The pace is important to defining their sound and style, but the variation of tones is what really makes this album. The first three tracks are all tremendous with deliberate beats and rhythms. However the band's finest moment comes in the title track which is also the closer. Clocking in at over 34 minutes by itself means that it's got a lot of ground to cover. This may be the darkest song of the four, but it's undoubtedly the most interesting. Albums like this require patience and focus from the listener. However the payoff is huge because the sounds don't just hit you, but instead they drag into another world. This album isn't so much an assault on the senses as it compliments your senses and lets you really feel on the emotions that are being emptied into the music.