There were a few very high profile funeral doom albums released this year but this is the only one that really hit home for me. Funeral doom is a tough genre; it might be slow, it might not focus on technical ability or knowledge of complex music theory, but it requires perfect compositional song writing. Within each track, usually spanning up to 10 minutes and beyond, the composers really have to pour their hearts out while making sure they don't bore the listener or alienate them with chord or time changes that would be less startling in faster, shorter songs.
On their self-titled album, Pantheist really stretched the boundaries of funeral doom, bringing quite a bit of beauty along with the sadness that defines this particular sort of music. The most prominent example of this is definitely the abundance of soaring clean vocals. So few funeral doom bands employ the use of clean vocals, it's refreshing to actually hear the vocalist's english accent and hear him stretch for those really heart-wrenching notes in counterpoint with the guitar leads. Each track on this album is well worth your patience especially "Be Here" which earns my award for saddest song of the year (which is a good thing).
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