SENTENCED: The Funeral Album

Released: 2005

With The Funeral Album, the curtain comes down on one of Finland’s best metal acts. Sentenced was one of those rare bands that was able to produce consistently fine albums and on what stands to be their final offering they have continued this proud record. Indeed, The Funeral Album is close to the finest album Sentenced has ever made, and that’s saying a lot. After all, this is the band responsible for the likes of Amok, North From Here, Down and Frozen; a group that went from being one of the leading lights of the early 90s melodic death metal invasion to perhaps the most important depressive Goth metal band in existence. This last act is Sentenced in all its guises, a band displaying all its creative facets for the final time.

Throughout, Sentenced flaunts their enviable gift for melody and songwriting. There is gentle melancholia like “We Are But Fallen Leaves” and “A Long Road to Nowhere”, dark Goth rock/metal hybrids such as “May Today Become the Day” and “Despair-Ridden Hearts” with its peculiar harmonica intro, and even a brief explosion of their early death metal sound in “Where Waters Fall Frozen”.

Yet as fine a collection of songs as The Funeral Album is, the final track eclipses them all. Fittingly, the band goes out on a grand scale and “End of the Road” could rank as the best song Sentenced ever put together. With a beginning that borrows heavily from Sisters of Mercy, this track enters under a dark cloud of gloom and depression and builds toward a crescendo that sounds like some kind of glorious redemption. As the last word from one of the best metal bands of the last decade, one could ask for nothing better.

1. May Today Become the Day
2. Ever-Frost
3. We Are But Falling Leaves
4. Her Last 5 Minutes
5. Where Waters Fall Frozen
6. Despair-Ridden Hearts
7. Vengeance is Mine
8. A Long Way to Nowhere
9. Consider Us Dead
10. Lower the Flags
11. Drain Me
12. Karu
13. End of the Road

Rating: 90%