By Charlie Bailey (@hecktic_skeptic)
On Dead Before I Die, guitars shriek like banshees. Filled with tracks that retain a dense sonic footprint, this record is emotionally draining and heavy in the best sense, where only the haunting interludes seek to offer a creeping respite. Akron, Ohio’s Funeral Commercial brilliantly meld the angst and emotion of post-rock, shoegaze, math rock, and midwest emo on their most ambitious full-length project to date.
Funeral Commercial started as the bedroom-shoegaze project of singer-songwriter/guitarist Thom Olenik, who began recording and sharing his tracks online during the Covid-19 pandemic. After years of development and the lockdown finally ending, Olenik added friends Tyler Brown (guitar/vocals), Christian Prieman (drums), and Evan Lifke (bass) to record their debut LP. Dead Before I Die clearly benefits from collaboration in the form of jamming and experimentation, elements which unearth a sound to match Olenik’s evocative songwriting.
Funeral Commercial are nothing if not a product of their environment. The album draws on an atmosphere of living in a Rust-Belt city past its prime: going to cemeteries for fun, hanging out at the same bars, and this feeling of inescapability. Most of the members are mainstays at the iconic DIY house It’s A Kling Thing!, where basement shows are backgrounded by staticky box TV’s from the early 2000s. The aesthetics come through musically with many tracks slowly building angst, like on “dead” and “wherever,” whose opening methodical standalone riffs almost sound like the beginning of a Duster song. Fuzzy, nostalgic guitars abound in cacophonous waves that provide an outlet for release, balancing this dichotomy of softness and heaviness. It feels like walking through a graveyard at night, one single beam of light illuminating the path, just waiting for something to jump out at you.
Dead Before I Die is weighty and ponderous. Reflecting on isolation, addiction, anxiety, and lost loved ones, the band literally pulls every ounce of emotion out of their instruments. Sharing the vocal duties between Olenik, Brown, and Lifke offers a variety of different sonics and perspectives while still maintaining a cohesive vision for the album.
Whether Brown is pining on “crawl” in raw, guttural screams, “If I had you in front of me again / What would I say to you” or Olenik is crooning on “dead” in soft distortion, “I don’t wanna be dead before I die / We don’t have long at all,” the interchangeability offers ebbs and flows into different genres, holding together an emotional tension that is strained to its limits. The bookends of Dead Before I Die “fumble” and “haunt” are some of the longest and most expansive tracks on the project, encapsulating their own microcosmic worlds.
From front to back, the journey that the album goes on is all-encompassing. From ecstatic feedback loops in the opener to the harshly soft denouement, it feels like almost every track reaches its own feverish peak. Funeral Commercial are at their best on this album, expressing the emotions that come with grief and loss in all extremities. A release of shout-sung vocals, expansive riff writing, and collaborative camaraderie provide a subtle catharsis that screams “I don’t want to be dead before I die.”