Funerary Ward
A Parasite Called Human

From Argentina comes the new quintessence of musical uselessness, the new absence of inspiration, the new AudioJoke, or, at best, the new talentless artist. Yes, alright, South America is not a country rich in dynamic musical realities, but honestly, no one forced this guy to become an avant-gardist! And let's not find justifications from the start because I just need to mention Coprofago and his colleague Voice Transmissions With The Deceased (review coming soon) to silence any tendentious claims.

But let's get to the point: our man (Martin) is not a newbie: despite his career starting only in 2002, he has churned out enough Demos and Full-length albums in a few years not to be considered inexperienced. In 2004, the year of release of this work, he was about halfway through his career. This guy's proposal should be a Drone Doom heavily influenced by Dark Ambient, but in reality, it's a Dark Ambient with an electric guitar. Although I am not a great connoisseur of Dark Ambient, I have heard enough albums to understand when a work is well done and when the sounds are thrown there more or less randomly. Artists of the caliber of Lustmord or certain works by Merzbow (the latter not always capable of maintaining high standards throughout his immense discography) demonstrate how much this musical genre has to say and how those that many might consider as intrinsic limits of the genre (repetitiveness, poor sense of melody, etc.) instead become extraordinary expressive tools. Moreover, when an artist embarks on a difficult path like this, it is assumed that at the very least he knows how to handle such tools well; otherwise, he risks ending up fooling around with a six-string and some software not even a hundred megabytes big.

"A Parasite Called Human" is a single track almost an hour long ideally divided into three chapters ("Parasite In My View", "Change Of Perception", "Final Vius In The Gate"). Theoretically, I could stop here and settle the work with a shrug, without even offering further explanations; yes, my dear friends, because in their incomparable desire to create something sensationally extreme, not even the much more famous Sunn O))) have ever thought of resorting to such low expedients. It is very easy to do something extreme by focusing on a formal characteristic that catches the eye more than the actual content: the length of compositions (from the very short Grindcore songs to the endless Funeral Doom suites) has always been an excellent way to make oneself talked about; but "Est Modus In Rebus" and those who do not understand this fall into the absurd. What the heck does it mean to make a one-hour track? Even if it were a song by U2, it would be equally exhausting. In short, those who try to wear out the listener demonstrate that they don't have many other arrows in their quiver. But let's move on.

The song is not only incredibly long, it's also ugly; the sounds are poorly made and attempt to mark a tempo that is unnecessary. In the background, overused threatening chants attempt to instill some fear. And meanwhile, the first six minutes pass, where variations on the theme are few and unimpressive. When the guitar comes into play, the immense poverty of this work begins to take shape; the notes rise or fall by a semitone and nothing more while the strongest emotions are provided by the overlapping effects that dominated until the sixth minute. It continues this way until the eighteenth minute; here, our hero decides it was time to change something and has some other unidentified instrument do the same work as the guitar. Around the thirty-minute mark, the second riff arrives, always performed by what seems like an out-of-tune piano but in reality will be the aforementioned cheap software. Background noises fail to improve the usual dark melodies, and keyboards are omitted just where they should intensify. From the fortieth minute onward, the initial and middle themes are practically revisited. Brilliant.

The first skill for anyone wishing to delve into this type of sound should be the ability to identify which parts to repeat and which to leave as just connections; the second should be understanding how long to repeat them so the hypnotic effect does not turn into boredom.

If this guy had taken a shorter step (in every sense), he could have easily cut forty minutes of "music" and left a decent twenty-minute Drone song: in this way, he would have saved the passages actually worthy of at least one listen and eliminated all that time wasted to achieve "extremism". Not to mention that by doing so, he would have preserved the destabilizing capacities of his work intact.

The moral is this; if one is not endowed with the inventiveness needed to create a truly original work, it is better to start low and pay one's dues. The risk, as "A Parasite Called Human" excellently testifies, is to end up as nothing more than a presumptuous failure. For now, he's held back.

Ps: I officially open the treasure hunt. Whoever finds this record wins a vacation in Arcore (firearms not included)