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I've talked about this album a lot. Every now and again I'll feel in the mood to just be 12 again: sad confused and angry.
Disclaimer: This kinda got away from me! Bare with what is basically a listen along once I get into the song breakdowns. I highly recommend listening along if you want to! Back to the gemlog!
I wish I could tell you how I found these guys. Being 2003/2004? Probably like Myspace or one of my emo friends on AIM. But I am thankful for whoever introduced me to them.
Oh, who is this band? Funeral For a Friend - a welsh post hardcore band that was apart of that mid 00s emo revival and their debut album is the topic of this post.
This album is 12 tracks and they're all bangers. Something I think that makes this album standout is the ordering of the tracks. The really standout songs are interdispersed evenly, though the singles are stack at 3/5 first songs.
This albums strength is its clear vision - for a debut album of a small band they had a clear vision for their sound. Tonally each song sounds the same - but its really just using the same building blocks to create banger after banger. You can hear them from the first chords in Rookie of the Year. You have dueling guitars harmonizing - going from playing in tandem to create a massive sound - to playing separate parts to create this wide melodic soundscape. The melody licks playing beneath massive power chords creating these ear-worms and hooks. And then the bass and drums just fill the space with such a massive sound. When you have one of your guitar playing these high melodies and the other guitar is dialed a bit back in the mix, you really see how much of the weight is being brought by the bass and drums.
And if Rookie of the Year wasn't the perfect audition - Bullet Theory is. Taking all of the things I called out from Rookie of the Year and just doubling down on it. The turnaround lead guitar line in the chorus is what, to me, makes this song. But when I think of these songs half the time I whistle the lead melody and not the vocal melody. And the breakdown in Bullet Theory is just dissonant and massive. While a trope in hardcore styled genres - Funeral For a Friend doesn't always have them! So it makes the ones they have stand out even more.
Juneau is their breakout single. My favorite part of the song is its use of 8th note double kicks. Just leveraging that steady pace to really add motion to the track. But yeah. I can see why everyone latched on to this song. It's really fucking good.
The next track: Bend Your Arms To Look Like Wings (top tier emo song title) is another one. Layers. So many layers. Both guitars are playing their own melodies. That just complement each other in ways I can't describe (because I am not educated in music analysis and theory - 12tone can you break down this song?) But this wasn't as big as some of the other tracks. But was my favorite. I still find myself singing the chorus quite often. Everything I've said about the album is true here - just a perfect song. But this song has a staple in FFAF songs - the long outro.
Followed by Escape Artists Never Die - another single from the album and just a good song all around. Everyone is just slaying it here. Drums, guitar, bass, vocals - A+ track. You'll hear a lot of the things that have made the previous tracks awesome here. But then you get a slow more melodic breakdown that acts as a bridge which also becomes a new chorus. It's interesting. I don't know enough about song structure to describe how they tend to do intro - verse - chorus - verse - chorus - bridge - new chorus - outro (which is just an instrumental chorus). And here is that long outro again. But we start to see their song structure pattern peeking out.
Storytelling is a great track that has a different feel than the others. All of the familiar parts are here but we've got a punk drum beat pounding during the verse which steps back a bit and opens up space for the pre-chorus and the further in the chorus in a way that clearly defines the three parts. It's really exciting and full of motion. Then for the bridge it steps back a bit further filling the space mostly with toms which brings into the altered chorus that ends in the typical FFaF fashion with a long melodic outro.
We're only halfway through the album ya'll.
Moments Forever Faded also brings a slightly unique feeling having the verse alternate between a mostly vocals section to a vocal-less section. Then like the verse - the chorus now alternates between clean vocals and screaming vocals all with some really intense drumming and some actual rhythm guitar. Which all combined makes this one of the heavier songs on the album all while having some of the most melodic and somber parts. All opening up into a really high energy outro which feels like the whole song was building to. And then we get a really sad outro as the guitars reverb into feedback and we fade.
She Drove Me To Daytime Television, a classic emo title, has one of my favorite choruses. With this just constant 8th note double kick holding the chorus in place much like in Juneau. You just wanna bang your head along to this track. This song moves that melodic instrumental part into the bridge which builds up and up into an explosive outro (as explosive as you get in some pretty straightforward post-hardcore).
Red Is The New Black has this really cool muted guitar intro line into probably my favorite guitar lick after the "Go!". We get the established screaming followed by clean lines during the verse with harmonized guitars. But then we get a beautiful chorus that will be stuck in your head for days. The big difference in this song is the dirty and clean vocals overlap much more and get what sound like a megaphone. The second chorus becomes the bridge which falls into a breakdown that's super heavy getting heavier and heavier that eventually drops out leaning on a snare fill that builds us back up into the chorus.
And then like all post-hardcore emo bands at the time - there is that one somber acoustic song. This is "Your Revolution is A Joke" but unlike others - this isn't some sappy love song or pandering to get airtime on the radio (it wasn't even a single). This one is just depressing. As is their acoustic song on their follow-up album - with a powerful music video to boot. I'm not the best at interpreting lyrics but this really hits home as it just emits apathy frustration and disdain for the state of the world. 20 years ago and I feel like it could've been written today.
Waking Up has a really up beat groove during the chorus that juxtaposed against Your Revolution is a Joke make it hit harder than it would say on shuffle. This song brings the breakdown up front and center not even messing around with a fun groove just 1/4 note chugging. The only variation is some panning and then it becomes the bridge where we get some harmonization underneath the lyrics. Then a fake outro that really feels final until the clean guitar comes in strumming some chorus beneath clean lyrics. A melody leads us into the real outro that ends a lyric too early with the same breakdown.
Novella is the final song and was another popular one with my friend group. Starting out with some heavy vocals, guitars, and drums its just ... heavy. But this song's chorus is another that sticks in your head that I find myself whistling. The chorus and verse feel like they should be in two separate songs with the verse vocals being pretty dirty but a clean and polished chorus. Structurally this is the simplest song being verse chorus verse chorus. But instead of just ending on a fairly standard track we get an interlude less than halfway through the song. With beautiful guitar work and drumming. The bass is really holding this interlude down and may be easy to miss. After a minute of instrumentals the lyrics come back in culminating in a snare roll exploding in heavy guitars and pure intensity. But instead of just ending there we return to the interlude. Though instead of lyrics coming back in we get piano and swelling guitars with the bass and drums keeping the song moving. Its quite haunting then one by one each instrument drops out and the album ends on a crash.
Legit. I can't speak more highly of this album. Every song is just solid as hell. I never intended to make this a song by song breakdown. This series was just supposed to be me gushing about how great these albums are and why I feel they're perfect. But literally 20 years going and this is still one of my favorite albums.
Another thing I love about Funeral For a Friend is the mid 00s emo scene was filled with boys crying about girls or just general angry white boy rage. But these guys really kept that "hardcore" part of the post-hardcore genre here singing more about societal issues and personal things outside of "girl, you left me and I'm mad". I think that's what keeps this album fresh over 20 years later - I don't cringe when I listen to it.
Anyway! I hope you check this album out its basically streaming anywhere!
I'd like to include my favorite track along with each of these like I do in my Top Album write-ups. I really don't know if I'll be able. I mean I had what I feel was a glowing review of each track and why they're all amazing. But I think if I think about it probably:
Bend Your Arms To Look Like Wings.
Whats funny is that I never really considered a favorite song off of this album, which is my favorite full album of theirs, but that's because my actual favorite track is from one of their EPs from the same year. But that's for another gemlog.
That's it! Please look forward to No. 2! I promise it won't be as fangirlly (hopefully?)
Steph, stop. We get it. You really love this album. We can all see that. But girl, seriously, if you don't stop typing you'll never release this!