Monday, June 18, 2012

Funeral and the Twilight: They Put You in the Ground


Fittingly, Funeral & theTwilight's Benjamin Jones practiced post death surgery and facial reconstruction prior to helping craft F&T's dressed-down, macabre sound. Together with Dave Bloxsom and Brandon Keegan, the Minneapolis three-piece crafts haunting theme-music to your own horror epic. One classification that I continually utilize is "machete-rock" -- one of those fantastically brutal apocalyptic convulsions that choreograph the fantasy of a targeted murder spree.

Painstaking, irreverent and indiscriminate, Funeral and the Twilight is like adding a fine wine or polished shoes to the mood, making it more of a waltz than a rampage. It's an eerily aggressive shredding of societal facades. Jones' vocals offer a peculiar vibrato-hued scream, pulsing almost counter to the off-beat melodies. Seriously beautiful stuff going on here. Each song offers an open-ended tale that hunts for meaning within the layered collage of images. It's angst-ridden at its own impotence. Calling attention to the variety of fucked up things that happen in the world, it realizes that any hope for salvation is an immediate admittance of failure. This is what we are -- brutal, bloody, violent, meaningless; yet, jettisoning the despair, we taste joy and love. It's an open-eyed leap into the void, fully embracing the reflection and hoping it shatters upon impact.

In their own words: "Jumped into the Mississippi River to die, but still live years later and onward. Punk as fuck."

Suck on that bubblegum.

No comments: