Published: March 6, 2018 

Eye of Solitude are from the UK and Marche Funèbre are from Belgium. They have teamed up to offer this doom-filled split release.

I’m a big fan of Eye of Solitude’s work, although it seems that somehow I seem to have missed out on the band’s last album. Regardless, Sui Caedre, Canto III, Dear Insanity, and their split with Faal were all wonderful examples of the band’s evocative funeral doom. On this split the band contribute the song Collapse, which lasts 16 minutes.

The song is atmospheric and mournful. Sorrow and woe fill every part of the music, from the keyboard-saturated opening section, to the heavy, monolithic guitars. The song is slow and unwinds gradually with a glacial intensity. Emotive leads are used to enhance the suffering that the music portrays, working in concert with the thick, heavy rhythm guitars to add colour to the walls of distortion that come crashing down at an inevitably crushing pace.

The singer’s deep deathgrowls are as well-performed as ever, and his voice seems to have a barely-restrained feral quality to it these days, adding an edge of danger to the edges of his pitch-black delivery. His is a voice that you can fall into and never return.

Oh Eye of Solitude, it’s great to reconnect with you. Collapse is a first-rate funeral doom song.

Before listening to this release I was unfamiliar with Marche Funèbre’s work, although I had certainly heard of them. They play epic death/doom, and I very much like what I hear here. Their song is named Darkness, and lasts 14 minutes.

Marche Funèbre combine heavy riffs, mournful leads, and atmospheric delivery. The music is more upbeat than that of Eye of Solitude’s, but still played in a sorrowful way. There’s a blackened aspect to parts of the music, but the majority is 90s-styled doom metal, stretched out and delivered with epic grandeur.

The singer performs deep growls, scathing screams, and clean singing. All sound very good, and I’m happy with whatever style is being used. His deathgrowls are quite aggressive, his screams are savagely scathing, and his clean vocals have a dramatic/theatrical quality to them that works very well, (he reminds me of the singer of …in the Woods in some ways).

This is a highly enjoyable split between two bands that know how to explore the darkness. Fuelled by negative emotions and filled with feelings of despair, this is a split you can easily lose yourself in.

Highly recommended.