Review of Rose Funeral - Crucify Kill Rot

Instead of getting all worked up in descriptive phrases, I’ll just lay it out as plain and clear as possible here. Rose Funeral are five kids from Cincinnati, Ohio, who belt out fairly average breakdown and blast-heavy death influenced metalcore. Comparatively speaking, Crucify.Kill.Rot. reminds me a little bit of early Cannibal Corpse, not so much in musical resemblance, but with a noticeable lack of technical tomfoolery, and a return to basics while staying somewhat current.

Unfortunately, there’s a peculiar way many of the songs on this disc just sort of sputter out at the end, almost in a way that feels like some of these tracks were left as-is through the creative process and they kept the basic skeletons of the songs intact from their initial ideas and did nothing else to spice things up (“God‘s Hideous Creation”, “Eternal Regret”). For instance, the title track isn’t even two minutes long, features a weird intro that takes up most of the song, a short typewriter blast, and then a breakdown which fills in the rest of the tune with the lyrics being comprised solely of the album title, with an abrupt ending. It sounds like they’re at practice and that was their first stretching/timing exercise, and with a less is more aesthetic being applied, it’s passable, but even for being so straightforward the material tends to be a little bland. There are a few cool start/stop stutter riffs that catch attention due to the precise sort of post-Fear Factory vibe that pops up often, but there aren’t enough of those moments that stand out overall when it’s over.

To be fair, not everything here sounds like Rose Funeral are merely going through the motions, and I can’t really point out a single track that blatantly sucks it hard and long. One thing does suck, however, and that’s the choice of drum sound. The guitars are decent and have a warm yet biting tone to them, but those fucking drums sap a great deal of heft and life from this album due to the thin, wind-up toy sound, and it doesn’t help that the bass guitar is rarely around long enough to offer any sort of valued support along the way. It was rather disappointing since these guys are obviously good musicians with decent ideas and a good sense of melody, so perhaps with a little more time and a better recording budget they might be able to stand out from the pack, but not right now.

Additionally, Rose Funeral throw in a couple odd current clichés into this album. There’s a soft piano interlude (“Dawning The Resurrection“), with a soft spoken-word track accompanied by the sound of rain (“Interio Diu”, the second of two short instrumentals), along with breakdowns galore, dual harmonies that pack no surprise factor, and gallops at every turn. None of it is really bad, but by the time it’s over all I can do is shrug in indifference the same way I do over Through The Eyes Of The Dead and Whitechapel. Nothing is done wrong, but Rose Funeral don’t offer anything new or even slightly different to set themselves apart in any way whatsoever, and as a result this extremely average disc just sort of flies by leaving neither positive or negative residue, it’s just ‘there’. If you’re addicted to this sort of thing, get your fix here, otherwise search elsewhere for your buzz.

Release Details

Rose Funeral

Crucify Kill Rot

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