A concept album is risky when you’re as meatheaded as Massachusetts’ Fuming Mouth. Don’t get me wrong, Last Day of Sun’s concept is unique and powerful, an apocalyptic vision of a world destined for darkness in twenty-four hours (hence the title) – a story further fueled by the act’s mastermind, vocalist, and guitarist Mark Whelan’s triumphant battle over cancer. For an act that has rarely been called the “thinking man’s” anything, it’s pretty high-brow to fuse an approach of death metal and hardcore with such heart-wrenching emotion. Long compared to acts like Gatecreeper, Frozen Soul, and Venom Prison, you’ll find Fuming Mouth recalling more Swedeath-influenced hardcore acts like Nails, Black Breath, and Mammoth Grinder, with some extra crust on top. Will the Last Day of Sun make you long for better days?
An obvious influence in Fuming Mouth and all the aforementioned acts is Entombed, and you could make the case that both eras of the Swedeath pioneers influence Last Day of Sun, with dark chunky death metal colliding with death ‘n roll passages. Debut The Grand Descent, however, featured more hardcore influence, with breakdowns and d-beats rolling like a boulder down towards our unassuming village. Last Day of Sun offers little different, with HM-2 punishment saturating every crevice of a darkened land gripped by panic. While ultimately Fuming Mouth offers some truly punishing material, new directions are misguided and the back half of Last Day of Sun largely falls flat.
Don’t get me wrong, opener “Out of Time” is one of the coolest intro tracks in recent memory: you don’t love metal if you don’t wake up in a cold sweat screaming “I. AM. OUT. OF. TIIIIIIIIIME!” in the middle of the night. Followed up by kickass riffs that blend hardcore intensity with palpable groove and solos in all the right spots, I can’t even look at you if you don’t like this track. Other cuts like “Respect and Blasphemy” and “Kill the Disease” embrace the crust with punky beats and frantic pummeling galore, while the slower tempos of “The Sign of Pain,” “Last Day of Sun,” and “Postfigurement” ensure the groove sits hot and heavy in the stanky face you wear. In good songs and bad, Fuming Mouth ensures that absolutely mammoth guitar tone fills the sound, making lesser tracks like “Burial Practices” and instrumental “Disgusterlude” listenable due to doomier tempos that capitalize upon the crunch.
Last Day of Sun both experiments with new sounds and stays true to Fuming Mouth’s roots in somewhat misguided ways. While the openers are solid, “The Silence Beyond Life” fiddles with cleans, while “Leaving Euphoria” is entirely sung. The former’s otherwise riffy approach feels tragically derailed by Whelan’s sudden tenor, while the latter, although the more solid of the two due to a hazy and forlorn atmosphere, nauseatingly repeats the lyrics to an early death. Onwards, you’d be hard-pressed to find some consistency in quality in the Last Day of Sun’s second act. “I’ll Find You” is disjointed while “R.I.P. (Rest in Piss)” and “Burial Practices” feel like lesser extensions of the groovy title track, then only to be sidewinded by the mad waltzing 6/8 timing of “Postfigurement.” “R.I.P. (Rest in Piss)” features a jarringly major chord progression that feels more pop/punk than the crust-death aggression it was intended to be, while the breakdown at the end of “The Sign of Pain” falls flat. Ultimately, especially compared to recent output by likeminded knuckledraggers like Creeping Death, Frozen Soul, and Tomb Mold, Fuming Mouth falls short.
While The Grand Descent offered wild potential for the quartet, Last Day of Sun is derailed by its ambition. While the concept is intriguing, Fuming Mouth doesn’t stitch its familiar death/crust and more experimental pieces together with enough consistency, worsened by the fact that their opening track is easily the best song here. With the first half being better than the second with wild inconsistency and featuring a bloated forty-six-minute runtime, Fuming Mouth’s Last Day of Sun ultimately feels like “the grand descent” in quality from an act with much more promise.
Rating: 2.0/5.0
DR: 6 | Format Reviewed: 320 kbps mp3
Label: Nuclear Blast Records
Websites: fumingmouth.com | fumingmouth.bandcamp.com | facebook.com/fumingmouth
Releases Worldwide: November 3rd, 2023
