I caught a quick glimpse of a reality TV show my wife watched the other week, and when asked what kind of music one of the protagonists liked, he rolled his eyes and said “depressive”. I wonder if the dude would be able to handle the depression funeral doom brings, as nothing quite spells that word as the aforementioned style.

As Finnish Reverend Bizarre has split up, its members went on to participate in multitude of projects, but Lord Vicar (the creation of guitarist Kimi Karki aka Peter Vicar or Peter Inverted in Lord Vicar itself) is the closest thing which could come to Reverend Bizarre itself. Staying with the doom tradition Lord Vicar has already released a pair of full-length albums, but at issue here is its split with Canadian doomsters Funeral Circle.

The sole song by Lord Vicar on this split, almost 14 min long The Fear of Being Crushed, dominates and extinguishes all hope. After clean intro, the subsonic bass frequencies lead into further mastodon heaviness unfolding at glacial pace. A pure clean reprieve, the melody which follows and Peter’s guitar playing passes my litmus test for a funeral doom quality – you want to grow steel talons and rip your heart open using them while listening to this music.

In any other combination Funeral Circle may have been very much passable, but next to a towering Lord Vicar the distorted guitar, Black Sabbath/St.Vitus influenced The Hexenhammer is being strongly overshadowed. Funeral Circle vocals, from spoken to hysterical, also pale next to Lord Vicar’s Chritus, who delivers clean weepy Ozzy lines. The text of The Hexenhammer, about witches and some such stuff, appears childish and outclassed compared to the depth of The Fear of Being Crushed.

Funeral Circle’s other track Burning a Sinner (Witchfinder General cover) has NWBOHM influences and more upbeat, even if nervous, energy, just like the original, and, as opposed to Lord Vicar, there is a feeling that actually not all hope is lost for anybody as a single human being.

My opinion on the split skewed heavily towards the more established Lord Vicar, this split is worth it for The Fear of Being Crushed alone.