NO FUNERAL / LIVID: Split LP (color vinyl)
Hand numbered, limited to 500 copies on 180 gram mixed colored vinyl. Lp includes download of full album Tracklist A01 –No Funeral Infection 8:30 A02 –No Funeral Disease Brought By Depression 10:53 B01 –Livid False Hope 18:29 "The very HEAVY new split from LIVID // NO FUNERAL – both bands bring the monolithic pain on this release in different ways! NO FUNERAL is one of the most slept on Sludge//Doom bands doing it right now. I’m going to make it my mission to make sure more people recognize what a fucking gnarly gem this band is! I love the way that they are able to take the blues and inject that motherfucker with the right amount of hate and morbid melody. Each track on this split has only made me more a fan of this band than I already was! LIVID takes a different approach to they way they draw the listener into their expansive universe of sound. Their 18 minute tune is a cosmic journey where black waterfalls of melody crash over giant emotional rocks of despair. The soaring vocals that you will encounter on this track act as a beacon of light that can guide your mind towards a new path of self expression!"-Cvlt Nation "Livid recently burst into the metal consciousness with their majestic upcoming record Beneath This Shroud, The Earth Erodes due out July 14th with Prosthetic, No Funeral meanwhile have made a name for themselves in recent years as one of the best bands to come out of the surprisingly rich Minneapolis scene. The split between these two bands is a simple monstrosity, something that you can get lost in and which reminds us time and time again of the burning power that this kind of music can have over our hearts and our minds.The Prosthetic signees kick off their side of the split with some colossal riffage, potent vocals and those crushing emlodies that you can't help but to love. Livid have quickly proven that they are a very special band and I think that a lot of people are going to very quickly buy into the sound that they have so easily crafted for themselves. Meanwhile No Funeral bring out a demented doom assault with a pulsing bottom end that drives their two tracks forward. There is something strangely mesmerizing about the way that their brand of sludge doom crushes its way into your heart, reminding you time and time again of why this band has come to dominate their city.When it comes down to it this is a great split because not only does it combine likeminded bands from a similar geographical region but it gives us a unique look at both bands. Livid's 18 minute long contribution to the split is far longer than anything on Beneath This Shroud, The Earth Erodes and this is No Funeral's first split, at least as far as I can tell, helping to present the band in a new and exciting way. When all is said and done it's a pleasure to lose yourself in these things and I'm very curious to see how both bands evolve!"-Two Guys Metal Reviews "Hailing from Minneapolis, Minnesota are doom bringers and misery merchants No Funeral and Livid. Above is the cover art for their brand new split that contains three songs, two by No Funeral and one by Livd. Both bands play a similar style of sludge infused doom and both styles are incredibly heavy, dismal, abyssal and murky. These two bands bring a sound that is undeniably heavy and skull grinding and within three songs No Funeral and Livid bring the misery and pain in heaps.This brand new split begins with Infection by No Funeral, an over eight minute slab of some of the most dismal and destructive doom you can get your hands on. The song begins with a low ominous hum of a guitar which spans across a minute and a half before the pounding drums and tolling bells appear providing you with a sound that makes you feel as though your life may just come to an abrupt end. Once you get deeper into Infection the song begins to breath and take off gifting you with slow dirges of bleak and completely hellish doom. No Funeral keeps Infection rolling at a slow burning pace making sure to drag you across the burning fields of the abyss as slow as possible. The guitars rumble and the vocalist roars blood thirsty growls all the way through until the track fades away into obscurity just for Disease Brought By Depression to begin.This second track by No Funeral is more of the same and more of what you would come to expect from these doom bringers. Disease Brought By Depression is introduced by another ominous intro that is followed by slow mind melting riffs that are combined with once again pounding and bone cracking drums only to be supplemented by grizzly unearthly growls. This track much like the first by No Funeral is just as dismal and bleak providing you with even more anguished and torturous doom for you to buckle under. Not to mention, whether No Funeral meant to or not, within each song is a dense and twisting atmosphere that does its best to asphyxiate you. Once you press play a cold and horrid fog washes over you through both tracks leaving you feel as though death is lurking.On the B-Side of things and to finish things off Livid presents False Hope. False Hope is an eighteen minute slab dragging track that presents you with a dark and mystifying tune for you to get lost in. Armed with fuzz lined riffs, rumbling bass lines and hypnotizing vocals, Livid takes you straight in to the darkness devoid of all light never for you to be seen again. False Hope paints a bleak and disparaging picture as it takes you through the dark and deep corners of your mind. False Hope is a memorable song even at the length that it is. Once you begin listening it is a song that is hard to forget and once you begin listening you become trapped in its vortex of doom. False Hope is a hypnotic dirge of doom that leads you right into a bottomless pit of despair and isolation. This track does a great job of leaving you feeling alone and bitter. This murky offering is a slow and somber march toward death and while listening you have no issues marching along. And even at this song’s length you never feel as though it is a burden to keep listening and you never want to stop listening. False Hope is a great closing track to this split with No Funeral as it makes you feel as though you are finally being laid to rest in the fetid dirt.This split between these two abyss dwellers is something to behold. This split is monolithic, heavy and an overall great listen. Both bands have tracks on this release that are great and pure doom misery at its finest and if you are a fan of doom it really cannot get any better than this."-Cadaver Garden "This split album is 3 only songs long but each song is a mammoth undertaking requiring time to absorb & enjoy them. Give it time because you’ll get way more out of it then you might on the first listen.The first two tracks come from No Funeral. Infection gets things started well with the sound of a gong being hit alongside some really dark sounding guitars & hard drum beats. When it does turn things up a notch its loud, sludgy doom sound is utterly brilliant. Guttural vocals & angry riffs combine to make a thrilling yet sombre listen. It’s as doom as you can get & so exiting to hear.The other No Funeral track, Disease Brought by Depression is as darkly impressive, the first couple of minutes just unsettling noise that eats away at the senses. When the metal kicks in it’s disgustingly heavy. Riffs & hooks that sound out of this world.No Funeral have brought the heavy doom to this split album. Their tracks are thrilling to listen too putting all the onus on Livid to somehow better them.Livid offer just one track but it’s an 18 minute doom heavy number that has atmosphere dripping from every pore. The slow methodical pace is dark & oppressive sounding with the only moments of lightness coming from the soaring vocal style. It’s an incredible listen that never feels like it’s dragging. Without even realising the 18 minutes will have flown by & you’ll be left feeling very satisfied.Having a serious task to try & match what No Funeral did, Livid have knocked it out of the park. The combination of two doom/sludge heavyweights makes this split album a must by for all metal fans. You won’t be disappointed".-Games, Brrraaains, and a Head-banging Life "I love releases like this, a split between two bands previously unknown to me, linked through shared locality and a label looking to expand the audience of their local scene. Here No Funeral, Livid and Live Fast Die Records offer a glimpse into the doom of Minnesota.No Funeral cut their twenty minutes across two tracks. Infection's slow deathly crawled intro immediately contradicts the band name - funeral doom goodness. Yes Funeral. Half way through its eight minutes guttural vocals appear, steering the ship to sludgier waters, the pace only picking up a couple of knots, the overcast cloud generated indicative of an impressive doom package, albeit largely missing anything unique. Disease Brought By Depression is more Coltsblood-like marches into the abyss, here getting slower and lower, until some filthy old school death metal riffing spices things up seven minutes in. It is a welcome reinvigoration to refresh the palette in time for the desolate ending.Livid offer only False Hope, epic evolving doom. A long, forbording journey lays ahead, eighteen and a half minutes, slowly tread to begin. The lead in is laced with gothic aura, there still a minimalism to proceedings when the vocals enter, it all part Paradise Lost, part The Cure. The atmosphere becomes charged, the subtle but steady increase of activity points to post-metal tension building. It never realises as such, eighties post-punk goth amid doom fog imagined in its place, Pallbearer meets My Dying Bride; slow and grand.Livid's debut album is out soon via Prosthetic, it is now a must hear, whilst whatever No Funeral's plans entail, I'll happily keep tabs on. There's little new here, but it's pretty enticing never the less, this release succeeding in shining the light on a scene, and two more bands, for us all to follow"-Ninehertz "I unexpectedly got wind of this split full length through an email from Live Fast Die Recordings, a U.S. label dealing strictly with doom metal, sludge metal, crust punk and experimental noise. The bands who contributed songs, No Funeral and Livid, were chosen to represent the doom and sludge metal scenes in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Just last year No Funeral released their full length Misantrope in digital format, this is available for streaming and purchase at Bandcamp. It was likewise released on two cassette pressings of 100 copies each and a small CD run. Livid’s debut album Beneath This Shroud, The Earth Erodes came out this month through Prosthetic Records, likewise in digital format, CD, vinyl and streaming on Bandcamp. Live Fast Die Recordings was founded last year and at their outset are distributing full length and demo releases from NF and a full length release by another Minneapolis band, Circadian Ritual. These are the first Minneapolis bands I am hearing about of late, and this far two of them are a fitting introduction. I became acquainted to sludge metal listening to Carnivore’s classic LP Retaliation and a few years later listening to Winter the first sludge metal band from Long Island who formed at a time when sludge was barely heard of and has zero popularity locally. Nevertheless I gravitated toward them for being in direct opposition to the easy route to popularity, depicting the apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic in a way that had not been tried. My first impression of No Funeral was much like hearing Winter for the first time. The distortion and feedback laden intro to their song Disease Brought By Depression for example gave me a clear vision of a devastated wasteland with nothing as far as the eye could see except for ruins, ruins and more ruins. If after all this time I could have my imagination sparked by a band I didn’t know about a month ago this was a release worth the time and effort to track down. As the feedback and distortion goes into grimy guitars, heavily distorted bass, piercing drum hits and tortured, rasping vocals it becomes self-evident this is no band for the faint hearted or listeners ill equipped to withstand the agonizingly slow dirges. This cut is a visit to deep depression it may be difficult to recover from. Backing up to the first No Funeral song, Infection, it begins with isolated notes I’d expect from a good black metal or DSBM album. To discover this is the foundation of the entire track was a profound moment. No Funeral is in no way an uninspired Black Sabbath clone; while paying homage to the Sabs they revitalize doom and sludge so well you have to hear it to believe it. Livid’s contribution to this split goes even farther to prove sludge metal’s continued validity. False Hope is an eighteen-minute journey into the innermost cosmos of solitude, emptiness and despair, played with a little more melody and an atmosphere that surrounds the vocals as well as the guitar, bass and drums. It’s a song with repetitive note progressions, but this doesn’t become too tedious as they’re designed to enhance the deep emotions presented. These bands are pure underground with no effort made to become palatable for mainstream consumption. And this split is not a bad start if you want to know more about doom and sludge from Minneapolis".-AEA Zine "No Funeral and Livid are both from the US and have joined up for this split release. No Funeral are up first, offering two tracks lasting 19 minutes. I haven’t encountered No Funeral before, but their sludgy doom is so laden with filth, misery, and nastiness, that I sincerely wish I’d been made aware of them earlier. Was there a memo?These two tracks are slow, dismal, and heavy, heavy, heavy. With doom pace and sludge metal intensity, these songs drip atmospheric menace and ugly threat. There’s a joyfully hypnotic repetition to some aspects of the music, and this draws you in like only the best doom sometimes can.With a choice display of riffing and a relentless intensity that belies the slowness of the band’s assault, the fact that the music manages to be both atmospherically emotive while also retaining its crushing force is very impressive indeed. The vocals consist of sickening growls and disgusting screams, well-performed and hideously effective. I haven’t come across sludge metal as satisfyingly played as this for a while now. These two songs almost physically embody the concepts of disease and malignancy.Phew. If I didn’t know that it was Livid who were up next, I would pity the band that had to follow No Funeral. So yes; Livid, who contribute one track lasting almost 19 minutes. As mentioned, this is a band I do know, from both their extremely enjoyable debut album Beneath This Shroud, the Earth Erodes, as well as their earlier EP Sint.Although Livid’s track shares some similarities with those of No Funeral, theirs is a more traditional take on the doom metal style; at least, it is if you coat everything in its own brand of dark grit and heavy filth, of course. Yes, Livid’s music inhabits the middle ground between sludge and doom metal, taking on the structural/compositional aspects of the latter, alongside the aesthetics and grimness of the former.In contrast to No Funeral, however, the vocals here are mournfully-sang cleans that seem to speak of some long-buried tragedy and woe. They’re very effective at what they do, and offer a certain purity for the listener to grasp when compared to the overall heavy gloom of the music. With nicely heavy guitars and an understated-yet-crucial sense of melody, this song is one of the best I’ve heard from this well-regarded band so far.Well, this really is a top quality split. With a lot more material than you usually get for something like this, and with each track a very definite winner, this is something that any doom/sludge fan should get their hands on".-Wonderbox Metal