Bandcamp Add up the seven tracks on Last Glimpse of Daylight and you get twenty-seven minutes. The longest song is six and a half. Two of the seven run under three.
For a funeral doom record that is close to heresy. The genre’s whole method is duration: you are supposed to be held in one chord long enough that patience stops being a virtue and becomes the subject. A band that calls itself The Mourners, formed in Cardiff in 2022, made a funeral doom debut you can play twice inside an hour.
They get away with it more often than not, and the way they do it is worth spelling out. Three of the seven tracks contain no band at all. The opener, “MMMMDXIV”, is seventy-one seconds of synthetic sub-bass pulse and metallic percussion decaying into an enormous room, with no guitar, no bass and no kit. “Passage (Interlude)” is an acoustic piano alone, later joined by low drones, played with the dynamics completely untouched so that the difference between one keystroke and the next survives. The closer, “Frost on the Windowpane”, is sub-frequency drone and dark pads underneath a very deep spoken voice. That is more than a third of the running time given over to texture, which is how you buy atmosphere without buying length.
It is a smart trade, and it means the four actual songs have to carry real weight. Two of them do. “Fallow Land” is the best thing here by a distance, and instructively so: it is dark and cavernous like the rest, but the master leaves headroom, the lead lines lift cleanly off the rhythm wall with their string separation intact, and the kit sounds like a kit, the kick landing with a defined push rather than dissolving into the low end. It proves the band can have the atmosphere and the definition at the same time. “Stay with Me” is the other keeper, and the only track with two voices: Camilla Tjernberg sings against Daniel Tjernberg’s growls over orchestral pads, and the contrast does what an extra four minutes of dirge could not.
The other two are where the cost shows. On “Embraced by the Moonlight” and on the title track, the guitars and the bass fuse into a single low-mid mass and the string definition goes with them, so what should read as a wall of chords reads as sludge with a melody occasionally surfacing. The growls sit deep inside the reverb as texture rather than as a voice, which is a legitimate funeral doom choice and works on the title track, but combined with the mud underneath it there are stretches where nothing is clearly in focus.
On a seventy-minute album that would be atmosphere. On a twenty-seven minute one it is a quarter of the record. The short runtime is the band’s best idea and also the thing that leaves them no room to absorb a soft patch.
Worth noting who was in the room, because it explains the confidence. Dan Swanö mastered it, John Courage and Daniel Tjernberg engineered, and the band produced it themselves with no label behind them. The lyrics are credited to Daniel and Mikael Tjernberg, and the artwork to Manino Linic. For a self-released debut that is a serious set of hands, and you can hear it in how deliberate the sequencing is, light draining out of the titles one at a time from moonlight through the last daylight to frost on a window.
A first record with a genuinely unusual thesis about its own genre, executed about two thirds of the way. If the next one gives the songs the clarity “Fallow Land” has, the brevity will start looking like the point rather than the constraint.
“Stay with Me” holds its guitars readable through very slow chord changes on long sustain, with a snare carrying a deep wet punch and a long decay, and the orchestral pads filling the depth without crowding the midrange. “Passage (Interlude)” is entirely uncompressed, an acoustic piano where the variation between keystrokes is fully audible, which almost nothing else in this genre allows. “MMMMDXIV” and “Frost on the Windowpane” carry no guitar, bass or kit at all, resting on synthetic sub-frequencies and long decay. “Embraced by the Moonlight” is the murkiest picture, guitars and bass welded into one low-mid mass with the chord definition lost inside it.
Standout tracks: Fallow Land, Stay with Me, Passage (Interlude)
