Funeral Diner - 2003 ...is Dead

Band : Funeral Diner

Album : Difference of Potential
Release Year : 2003
Genre : Screamo | Emo Violence | Post-Rock

Tracklist : 

1. Yeah, You Remember That
2. A True Triumph Of Man Vs. Machine
3. Welcome To My Book Collection
4. Chameleon
5. Wearing Thin
6. City Of Webs
7. Shifting
8. This Truly Is God's Country
9. Let Me Get A Few Practice Stabs
 

This Truly Is God's Country - Up to this point the story has been played out, sometimes failing, and sometimes in time. But always present and always feeling just this close to breaking. There was nowhere else to go and nowhere would have been right. Hiding in corners, hoping for curtains or shadows to hide behind and change the colors of feeling. Building something out of nothing again. A wall, a door, a pillar, and another place to live and change. Changing again, transparent and out of focus, but with the best intentions always in mind. But always this close to breaking and the running away never helps. And the holes that you dig are always deeper, though better informed. (As much as it hurts) they were right when they said, "change is the only constant." So i'll keep this salt in my wound. So i can keep that in mind.

Funeral Diner were one of the best current hardcore bands pushing and building on a style that is already over a decade old. Trebly guitars, throat shredding screams, beautiful drumming and powerful bass surges are here in spades. Not unlike Portraits Of Past, with whom they shared a member and a geographic location, Funeral Diner went leaps and bounds towards combining frantic hardcore with long subdued passages of instrumental rock. Call it Americas answer to Envy's answer to America, call it post-hardcore, call it screamo, it doesnt matter. Funeral Diner is dead. Whats left is all that matters now...

This was released as a Euro Tour CD and contains tracks from a variety of places, including a compilation, a 4 way split and splits with Dead City, Raein, Evylock and Welcome the Plague Year. The good thing about this compilation is the improved recording quality of all the tracks involved.

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Funeral Diner - 2003 Three Sides Dead

Band : Funeral Diner

Album : Difference of Potential
Release Year : 2003
Genre : Screamo | Emo Violence | Post-Rock

Tracklist : 

1. Lucky Strike
2. I wish I Could Do the Backstroke
3. Choirs And Cannons
4. Shifting
5. Direct Hit
6. Easy Chair Method
7. Torn Safety Net
8. Anemic Bulemic
9. Sleeping Boy The Paranoid
10. My Fist Smells Like Graveyard
11. We Don't Belong In Concrete
12. The Nightbuilders
13. Sleeping Boy The Paranoid
14. Journeyman
15. .5
16. Sleeping Boy The Paranoid (original version)
17. Pharmacy Rage

Well, this album is a compilation album from their previous split with Nexus Six, Staircase, and The Shivering. Enjoy!

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Funeral Diner - 2000 Difference of Potential

Band : Funeral Diner

Album : Difference of Potential
Release Year : 2000
Genre : Screamo | Emo Violence | Post-Rock

Tracklist : 

1 Syncope
2 Direct Hit
3 Lackluster
4 There Are No Todays Today, So There Is No Yesterday's Tomorrow
5 I Wish I Could Do The Backstroke
6 Chalk Angels
7 Paper
8 Fire...Deth

This is a great follow up to the Funeral Diner/Staircase split LP. Funeral Diner creates a dramatic and moody hardcore assault that is over flowing with passionate and well crafted songs. Slightly arty, slightly depressing, very emotive, solidly honest, and intense sounding music that never lets go of their passion.

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Funeral Diner - 2007 Doors Open [12'']

Band : Funeral Diner

Album : Doors Open [12'']
Release Year : 2007
Genre : Screamo | Emo Violence | Post-Rock

Tracklist : 

1. This Wrath
2. Carved From Stone
3. Neither Option
4. Head of Vecha
5. This Optimism

Doors Open is a Funeral Diner-album often overlooked in favour of The Underdark, the record commonly hailed as the band’s magnum opus, and is almost solely remembered for being the last release from the band. However, it is a great creation in itself and further pushed Funeral Diner’s musical progression.

Most instrumentation on Doors Open builds on a steady rhythm section. Drummer Matt Bajda, excellent as always, is able to keep the songs together on his own, allowing the rest of the band to depart on very brief instrumental adventures, built up by only a few notes or chords. And that is what Funeral Diner is all about at this point, as the songs are indeed very repetitive during certain passages and it is only these small effects in the instrumentation that keeps the listener’s interest. Perhaps the best example of this is the last build-up in the album closer, This Optimism, where the roles are switched; in this case, a long, monotonous melodic line is played by the guitars while Matt Bajda drums away with various fills until the final crescendo, an effective and sudden way to end the album.

While Funeral Diner have always fallen back on the long, slow-moving melodic passages popular in the emocore scene, they have now almost completely left this approach, instead opting to build a more consistent pace the songs throughout with only very short interludes, if any at all. This creates a not-so dynamic album and to solve this problem Funeral Diner varies the tempo between the songs rather than within them. Neither Option, for an example, is a very calm song which constantly fools the listener that a release of emotions will follow after a specific passage, but only at the end does this happen though not in the way one might expect. Both the lyrics and the vocals are a step-up for the band. Seth Babb has traded his earlier hardcore-yell for a much cleaner and smoother vocal style which he only seldom utilised up to this point. During climaxes in the songs his old barks are instead replaced by a more high-pitched scream in the vein of a band such as The Saddest Landscape. The lyrics trotted out are no longer about politics or humanity at large, instead conveying a sense of isolation and unfulfillness though they are vague and open to interpretation.

There are however some weak sides to the album. It takes some listens to understand the point of Carved from Stone and Neither Option. The latter creates another problem: the overall running of the album. It is noticeable slower and less multi-faceted than the rest and, while being a great song on its own, it stalls. And this is perhaps the weakest link. While The Underdark was crafted as an album, Doors Open is, in the end, merely a collection of songs without the coherence and mood set by its predecessor.

 

 

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Funeral Diner - 2006 Tour Demo [3'']

Band : Funeral Diner

Album : Tour Demo [3'']
Release Year : 2006
Genre : Screamo | Emo Violence | Post-Rock

Tracklist : 

01. Addendum
02. I Was the Sword
03. Two More

3 songs in mini disc. This time the vocal try to singin, and that's awesome. Well check this one out, it's awesome!!

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Funeral Diner - 2005 Swept Under [10'' + CD]

Band : Funeral Diner

Album : Swept Under [10'' + CD]
Release Year : 2005
Genre : Screamo | Emo Violence | Post-Rock

Tracklist : 

10"
1. borne upon my shield
2. under
3. never to be
4. foe the beasts

CD
1. borne upon my shield
2. under
3. never to be
4. foe the beasts
5. city of webs (title remix)
6. shifting (battery cage remix)
7. this truly is god's country
8. shifting (midnight laserbeam remix)
9. shifting (black van remix)

This is one of their more known albums, since it's on Amazon and iTunes. Borne Upon My Shield is unusually high energy with an awesome intro and little interlude. Under has good instrumentation and intensity typical of Funeral Diner, but I can't find anything extraordinary about it. Never To Be, however, bursts out strong, dies, builds up, and then ends all of a sudden -- which I love. Not to mention I can actually understand all the lyrics without looking them up. For The Beasts is one of their 8-minute songs like Fire...Deth or A True Triumph of Man vs. Machine, all of which are awesome. Matt Bajda sounds great on the drums, which is the main reason this song is incredible. The vocals and guitar are better than usual too. The remix's aren't really what I like; I think the album would have made a good EP without them. Shifting and This Truly Is God's Country are incredible songs, but See Colin Slash is the only one on here that I think does a good cover.

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Funeral Diner - 2002 The Wicked EP

Band : Funeral Diner

Album : The Wicked EP
Release Year : 2002
Genre : Screamo | Emo Violence | Post-Rock

Tracklist : 

01. ...And The Beast Shall Be Made Legion
02. End On 6.mp3
03. The Wicked
04. It Burns

This one opens with a strange instrumental, "...And the Beast Shall be Made Legion", which uses lots of nice clean passages and soft, moody playing; disrupted only by the presence of weird sort of somber atmospheric keyboards that are a blend between cheesy hipster sounding stuff and something a less-than-good metal would do for an intro. "End on 6" then brings in the distortion and screaming vocals, somewhat more typical in style (sort of dark screamo stuff), but I do really like the tightness of the performances and the subtly eerie sense of melody/dynamics. The title track is then more frantic and perhaps heavier, one of my favorites herein, as is closer "It Burns" with its shifts from calmer clean guitars to acerbic distortion and dissonance. I will say that the recording is good, while inconsistent. I like the punch of the drum tones, the bass is solid, the guitars clear, etc. The vocals also sound pretty good, though stylistically the whole screaming/speaking thing is a little tired here. It's not bad at all.

If nothing else I like the importance of the rhythm section within these compositions. I'm definitely bothered by the fact that "End on 6" and "It Burns" are so much quieter and flatter than the other songs, though. They sound like they come from a totally different recording session, but there are no credits to indicate such inside the packaging. The disc comes in a simple digipack with black and white and maroon coloring and fairly minimal artwork depicting landscapes and rugged building interiors. No lyrics or anything like that, just brief credits and the song titles. A strange EP. It's not something I'd listen to regularly, and it looks pretty bland, but I can appreciate the last three songs. The keyboards definitely break up the otherwise interesting opening piece, but this would've been a bit more effective without those elements. Pretty good for what it is. I've heard far, far worse. There's just nothing here that grabs me enough, and the bland presentation isn't helping that. Decent, but nothing striking.

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Funeral Diner - 2005 The Underdark

Band : Funeral Diner

Album : The Underdark
Release Year : 2005
Genre : Screamo | Emo Violence | Post-Rock

Tracklist : 

1. Decline
2. Collapsing
3. We Became Buried
4. It Is Good That We Never Met
5. Two Houses
6. What Was Said
7. Regardless We Fall
8. We All Have Blood On Our Hands

Funeral Diner came from Half Moon Bay as well. There's something in that town that spawns bands that are in touch with their own misery. They both have parts that are morose and downplayed, and others that are raging and cacophonous. However, Funeral Diner is a more standard emo band than Under a Dying Sun, who dabbled in multiple genres. By sacrificing the experimentation of a genre tranny, they excel at honing their specific craft. Funeral Diner produces emotional hardcore prolifically and masterfully. I really do mean that. If you go to their website, you'll notice tons of splits (with Welcome the Plague Year, The Saddest Landscape, etc.), a few EPs, and finally The Underdark their first LP. while previous work had been heterogeneous and scattered, Funeral Diner wrote this album with the intent to produce a fluid monolith of emotional hardcore. Each song blends into the next and the whole CD runs from start to finish with few flaws.

That is, many flaws. Emo as a genre draws beauty from the moments in music when there are mistakes that spawn from emotional outbursts and artistic frustration. There is an amazing amount of expression in every song. With some bands, this overtly cathartic style wears off after a few songs. With the Funeral Diner, they manage to build up to these moments of breakdown with carefully constructed songs. Their first song, "Decline," is essentially a warm-up CD for the rest of the album. It starts with a simple guitar line that reminds me of a Nine Inch Nails or Tool song (something crazy from the 90s). And of course, they build on this idea. The song picks up and plods along until it reaches the "Collapsing." From here the vocals kick in, and the CD erupts, or collapses I guess. To begin an album with a 4-minute song that only is there to set up the rest of the album is either extremely foolish, or clairvoyant. Funeral Diner wrote this whole CD as one fluid piece, and they use whole tracks as individual devices for building or releasing tension. It's a great sensation to be yanked from high to low so masterfully. Unlike the chaotic screamo bands that are popular in the modern scene, Funeral Diner takes their time setting the mood, before they upset it and throw it all over the place. The soft to loud dynamics are stretch over minutes at a time instead of seconds. A great effect.

The technical aspect of the album isn't impressive, but then again, that's not the point. The instruments are interesting. "Interesting" may be a generic word, but it's true. The harmonic interplay is pretty stable and doesn't mess around too much. they dabble in modal melodies, which changes their flavor a little bit, but in general, when listening to this album, experimentation and technicality is not the linchpin of your enjoyment. It's all in the mood. An aid to this "Half Moon Bay" atmosphere is the production. With emo bands, crappy production and vinyl pressing is the norm. Funeral Diner does a little bit more with this, and it pays off. Echo pedals with a slight modulation on the sound works perfectly for those ambient moments, and a mix of clean tone and distortion works perfectly during the intense parts. The distortion distinguishes the high pitched octave melodies on the guitars and the clean tone adds to the meat of the more background guitar. Often though, these two guitar parts are one in the same and are just employing the same octave technique, giving some cool harmonies. Because octave chords can be moved quickly, Funeral Diner often implies a chord over the chorus of a few beats or a measure while throwing in a bunch of decoration on the guitar, which gives a great sense of power through the emotional crescendos of the music. Great choices overall.

This CD is fluid, beautiful, and engaging the whole way through. It's murky and depressing, but also powerful and brisk. A triumph for modern emo only eclipsed by the epic heights of Circle Takes the Square and the progressive styling of Hot Cross. My only fault to this album is that it's almost too much. It's homogeneous and intense to listen to. I've been on a binge recently, so I figured I'd write my review when I high on it, instead of when I'm depressed and watching the fog come in while driving around in Half Moon Bay.

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