By It’s our Bandcamp Pick of the Week, featuring omilgop’s achingly emotional slowcore project FUNERAL. As a reminder, today (2/6) is also Bandcamp Friday, where Bandcamp will donate 100% of its proceeds to MusiCares to aid those affected by the devastating Southern California wildfires. We wrote several weeks ago about several great charity compilations available right now where their respective proceeds are also going to various wildfire charities and funds. Check out write-ups of those compilations here, and plenty of other recommendations elsewhere on the site!
omilgop – FUNERAL
Genre: Slowcore, Indie Rock
Favorite Tracks: “amateurish,” “stillplant”
In a lot of ways, omilgop’s story is aspirational. In October of 2022, the anonymous Daejeon artist released his first album, NOISE OR NOSTALGIA. Prior to that, he says, he was an avid music listener: Japanese city pop, “Korean Indie music, Shoegaze, Slowcore, Indie Pop, Indie Rock, and Post-Hardcore etc,” he writes on the Bandcamp page for NOISE OR NOSTALGIA, and he links his RateYourMusic and LastFM accounts through his Linktree. All this omnivorous listening had an interesting effect on him: “One day I wanted to make an album.” He dismisses NOISE OR NOSTALGIA as “amateurish” in that same blurb, but the narrative is clear—omilgop was just a fan and now he’s a musician, and you can do it too.
It’s been over two years since NOISE OR NOSTALGIA, and his third LP, A TRAIL OF FADING, got some (limited) press on a couple of indie sites, but omilgop hasn’t slowed down, beginning 2025 with another LP (less than a year after A TRAIL OF FADING, too). Although omilgop’s personal tastes are wide-ranging, the music he makes fits one mold: tranquil, hushed slowcore in the vein of ‘90s giants like Low or Duster. He happens to be quite good at it.
He previewed FUNERAL with “tear down the ashes” and “burning word” in July and December of last year, respectively. Between the two, they give a good idea of what to expect; “tear down the ashes” unfolds loosely, the full band meandering along for about three minutes before teasing a crescendo that never comes, and opening number “burning word” is a noisier, slightly louder take on that same slowcore sound. It’s more energetic, and the guitars buzz and scrape against its clattering percussion, but it still never moves faster than a gentle crawl.
Sandwiched between the two, “stillplant” is one of only two songs that remotely fit FUNERAL’s shoegaze Bandcamp tag; for two minutes, omilgop drags the track forward across a lumbering beat and a simple strumming pattern before the guitars explode outward without warning. In another context, “stillplant” might not scan as particularly revolutionary. But in the soft and free-flowing world omilgop’s crafted with FUNERAL, that electric guitar might as well have torn a hole in the universe.
He returns to that well on “new season,” which follows “tear down the ashes” and almost serves as the payoff that song spends four minutes teasing. All upward motion, “new season” begins serenely until about halfway through, when the drums come to life and the guitar washes omilgop’s voice out. It’s over almost before it begins, a metallic-sounding, clanging beat forcing itself in as the guitars take on a droney, doomy edge; although the song ends with just the slow strumming of a guitar, it’s the heaviest he ever gets, a deep and resonant tone that suggests a malice just outside of the edges of FUNERAL’s placid frame.
The 15 minutes that follow are more traditional fare: “hibiscus” is a sunny singer-songwriter tune in the vein of Red House Painters in both its sparseness and its length. Although the drums on “fleetingmoment” let loose more than on any other FUNERAL cut and although the piano plunks out a lovely melody, even when the guitars are pushed to the fore they feel warm and enveloping rather than disruptive, a blanket over the wound “stillplant” tore open.
The album’s most daring moment is its last; “flashback” plays out like if the final moment of “new season” had been stretched out into its own full song. It’s a dark and foreboding track built on a dry, distant, metronymic beat and a loping drone, omilgop’s voice reduced to radio chatter submerged underneath it all. In the Bandcamp blurb that accompanied the “tear down the ashes” single release, omilgop intimates that he is “trying to create a different genre these days maybe, so I’m making it with the mindset that it’s the last one anyway.” If FUNERAL is the end for omilgop, “flashback” is an incredible way to go out, a demonstration that for as good as he is at crafting melodic slowcore, he’s just as adept pushing past it. Pick up FUNERAL on Bandcamp.
Comments