Funeral Diner
Difference of Potential

What is "Difference of Potential"? It is a hell of an album, with a capital H and all the halos involved. It's good to make certain things clear right away, there are no alternatives or detailed descriptions that could hold up. The time machine pushes its clock back 13 years ago when in 2002 this poisoned arrow was fired, which, to be honest, had already set in motion four years earlier. The archer is called Funeral Diner and you really should kneel on peas or hot coals if in your listening there's the magic word skramz and you've never given these guys from the cheerful town of San Mateo County, Half-Moon Bay, a listen—eleven thousand inhabitants on the Californian coast, a good handful of miles south of San Francisco, where among steep sea stacks and the Pacific breeze, the perfect environment was created so that in '98 such emotional chaos was molded with such force.

The work of Funeral Diner is a matter of seconds, but not because the gears engage lightning fast and unregulated in their hammering, but because it takes very little to realize that every track present here is a pearl destined to remain enshrined on the screamo ocean floor. To put it much more simply: a milestone. Distinguished by a blackened soul like pitch, a chronic and overwhelming pessimism that leads down cursed paths, where as a pastime one can show children the disgusting future, instilling in them permanent nightmares and cyclical anxieties that keep them awake at night, Funeral Diner is aware (oh yes, they are) of their means. Don't worry, they're not on a hallucinogenic trip; it's simply a reinterpretation of "Paper" that opens up to the suffocating stage of the eight minutes of catharsis aka "Fire..Deth" in which many, many, many, so many groups in 2015 try to identify and replicate, with a personality tending toward that of the fax I can find down the road at FedEx. In the compositions of "Difference of Potential", the secret is secreted, which isn't really a secret—that of being pioneers of a musical scene that has made and will continue to make history, beyond American soil. The squeezing anxiety furiously constructs step by step a wall of sound where the guitars constantly raise their gain, hoping to hide fears and fragilities. All that remains is to witness helplessly the exhibition of decay and ghostly choruses, where a dark scratch madly rises with bitterness. When the arpeggio of "Syncope" starts to resonate, there is nothing emotional, or better yet, there is a resounding implosion. The jolts and hesitant melodies burn and consume, reducing everything to crumbs. Moreover, they themselves say that they no longer want to feel any passion. Zero chance. Cheerfulness, as good Mike would say (RIP).

The surgery with which the Californians operate is magnetic. Precise and deadly at the same time, they offer openings towards post shores, but the beautiful thing is that there is no cliché of the case as nowadays is increasingly heard. You will never have the thought "oh, here we are", no sir, here you get slammed to the ground because the sounds are so, forgive the Anglicism, damn RAW. In uppercase, because yes, here we scream to the incontrovertible disaster that escapes through the suffocating tunnels of a drum kit that keeps attention always high and a sinisterly sinuous bass, almost as if there was always a constant danger to confront. Masks that break and shatter on the ground with the streams of rage first measured, dosed and then poured over in a blind fury. In "Difference of Potential" there is atmosphere, oh yes there is, that leaden kind, which at the same time you'd never want to end, and here you are faced with skilled architects weaving dense plots that know how to balance every element of their chemical formula. There's a moment for everything, our guys are in no rush, despite the sense of urgency conveyed by their music being as harrowing as ever. In their universe, everything is dying and scorched, hallucinatory just right. The winning shot, just to connect back to the start, in Funeral Diner's screamo is given by the structural cerebrals, where discomfort finds its maximum expression. Not everyone can condense this lyrical vision into musical notes; it's for a few, it's for them.

So walking on the edge of a road soaked by the recent rain and casting a glance at these villages that follow each other, losing themselves out of sight in the distance with the deafening and repetitive noise of the Pacific on the shore, the personal apocalypse of Funeral Diner ends. The operation that reopens every wound comes to an end. A slice of calm opens up and finally relaxes the nerves that had been trapped in the meticulous web prepared by our friends from Half Moon Bay. Anyway, don't worry, in the tortuous labyrinth that is their discography (among EP, split, compilation, blablabla) there will be another opportunity to reach such dizzying peaks of old-school screamo. Ask for information from Gustave Doré, Virgil, and Dante, who are waiting for you there, on the cover of "The Underdark", but that's another story.