Worship Metal Album Of The Week – Lone Wanderer – The Majesty of Loss

Source // Lone Wanderer

Funeral doom eh! Incomprehensible dirge with no real purpose or mournful, dreamlike poetic license set to the heaviest music imaginable?

Well, maybe it’s the time of year but we fall firmly in the latter camp, this kind of unbearably bleak, leaden weight funeral lament feeling oddly relevant during the height of winter. Perhaps it’s the endless dark of the winter solstice; muscle and bone frozen solid from falling temperatures and the feeling that warmth and light will never return that endears itself to funeral doom. Who knows?

Either way, welcome Lone Wanderer.

Hailing from Germany, Lone Wanderer’s debut album is upon us. Featuring four lengthy crushing hymns of classic funeral doom and operating at a predictable snail’s pace, this epic album comes ladled with powerful precision and pure funeral doom metal majesty.

It’s apt that Mournful Congregation’s Damon Good handled mixing and mastering duties on The Majesty of Loss as these legends of the scene, alongside Evoken and Thergothen, prove influential standard bearers. Much like Mournful Congregation, Lone Wanderer alternate between hushed spoken word delivery and chilling guttural growls; wrought emotion laid bare over some surprisingly melodic riffs, replete with calm breaks, acoustic sojourns and moments of tragic beauty.

Most noticeable is the sense of morbid melancholy conjured by each track. While it’s true to say that a sense of repetition understandably pervades, the overall feeling of The Majesty Of Loss is suffocatingly yet satisfyingly intense and slowly sucks you into its world with remorseful ease.

Lone Wanderer then, deliciously desolate and competing with the finest of the sub-genre.

Not bad for a debut! 9/10