Their “Out Of Reach” online video may have been viewed 90,000 times within just 2 weeks of its release and their tracks on Myspace played 5,293,903 times and counting, but fans in Singapore needn’t Google/Myspace/Youtube for these Brit rockers to get a first hand taste of their music, as come Sep 8, Funeral For A Friend lands on local shores.

Since the formation of Funeral For A Friend from the ashes of the band once known as January Thirst in Dec 2001, the Welsh musicians have released three EPs, finally producing their first full-length album in 2003, Casually Dressed & Deep In Conversation, which received praises from bbc.co.uk, stating that it’s “worth anyone’s while, and will be remembered as an astounding and bold debut”.

By mid-2003, the band won their first Kerrang! Award for “Best UK Newcomer” which, according to Wikipedia, can be attributed to their large fan base, as the votes were casted by the public on the Kerrang! website.

Funeral For A Friend will find themselves yet again at the Kerrang! Awards this year, with nominations for 2 awards – Best British Band and Best Single for their song, “Into Oblivion (Reunion)”.

While they may have won over hordes of fans from just their first album, their 3rd and undoubtedly bravest album yet, Tales Don’t Tell Themselves, has climbed to number 3 on the UK Album Charts, according to Wikipedia.

“Into Oblivion (Reunion)”, arguably their most successful track, has Matthew Davies, lead vocalist and guitarist and the main song writer for the track, gushing, “I sang what I had to the band to see if they liked it and everybody stopped and went, ‘F**king hell!’ It became one of the most direct and uplifting choruses we’ve ever written. We played the song six or seven times immediately after that because we didn’t want to lose the tingle we had down our spines. It was special”.

But the fame the band experiences wasn’t an overnight success. According to a press release, Ryan Richards (drums and vocals) admitted that after 2 months of working on songwriting, they were severely lacking in inspiration. “We wrote a bunch of stuff… They were good songs I suppose, but none of it was very different from the music we had written for our last album “Hours“. We were just going over old ground. Matt (Davies), was struggling for lyrics too and he didn’t seem to be particularly inspired by anything,” said Richards.

A twist in fate resulted in Richards taking a 3-week break when his wife gave birth to a baby girl, while the rest of the band worked on the album,still uninspired.

The break proved more than worthwhile, for Richards regained his muse and reunited with the rest of the band with a new perspective. “We were in such good spirit that we’d finish one [track] and then we couldn’t wait to start the next,” says Richards. “We were thinking, ‘What’s next?’. Then we were pumping them out, one after the other. All those songs ended up on the record. That was the core of the album.”

The core element about Funeral For A Friend that sets them apart from the pool of emo/rock/post-hardcore bands is the bold move they undertook in adopting a new creative format to reinvent the band. Davies took the inspiration he had from his days as a film student and started writing tracks in a theatre-form format. “I like the way stories flow, I like the way country music tells stories, and I wanted to try it too,” says Davies.

“It was almost as though we were writing the soundtrack to a film. We’d never written that way before. We felt we could really stand upon what we were doing. Listening back to the other tracks we’d written over the summer was odd – there was just no comparison to what we had been doing and where we were going… We felt born again, we felt like a new band,” adds Richards.

Have you ever gone to a rock concert and had the feeling of desperation in trying to understand the lyrics of the music, but all you could hear was painful-sounding, throaty noises with head banging guys shouting into a microphone? Thankfully, unlike other emo/rock bands, you won’t have to digest track after track of angst-ridden lyrics about the back and forth dilemmas about being in a relationship, which seems to be the one cliché element evident in most bands, album after album.

One thing that struck a chord with me while listening to “Tales Don’t Tell Themselves” is that the lyrics are very family-oriented, yet the music remains edgy. Each track tells a different story and evokes a special kind of emotion.

“We wanted to make a very big, f**king grand sounding record,” Davies sums up. Enough said about their latest album, and if their live performance is anything compared to the studio recorded songs, those privileged to be at the show are probably going to have a blast.

Tickets are on sale now at all Sistic outlets and are currently going at $85* each until Sep 7th and then $95* on the day of the show.

Concert Date: Sep 8

Time: 8 pm

Venue: The Pavilion at Far East Square

Prices: $85* until September 7th and then $95* on day of show

For bookings and more information log on to www.sistic.com.sg