Cautionary Tales release “No Funeral Blues” from upcoming album

Pōneke-based art-rockers Cautionary Tales’ new single “No Funeral Blues” from their upcoming self-titled debut.

An elegy for a friend, “No Funeral Blues” is a riff on WH Auden’s poem “Funeral Blues”, arranged as a slow, creeping post-rock composition. Similar acts include Low, recent Nick Cave releases, Swans, and Mogwai.

Cautionary Tales is an experimental art-rock collective, based in Berlin via Aotearoa and NYC. Fronted by Will Marshall, a songwriter with a swaggering baritone, Cautionary Tales work with a palette borrowed from contemporary art-rock, Greek myth, modernist poetry, the weirder edges of electronic music, indie pop and post-punk.

The phrase “cautionary tales” describes one of the fundamental types of story-telling; the story that tells us “what not to do”. With roots in folklore and myth, these stories are found in everything from fables to epic Greek poetry, to modern horror films, exploring the myriad ways life can go terribly or comically wrong.

Rooting their story-telling in this ancient form, Cautionary Tales’ debut is a surrealist blend of disparate musical influences. Often spacious and sometimes bitingly aggressive, they move seamlessly between post-rock compositions, tight garage-rock grooves, and deep trip-hop, painting vivid backdrops to Will’s blackly comic narratives.

“No Funeral Blues” was released on the 19th of May, with the full album Cautionary Tales released on 18 August 2023 by Siren Song Records, available at cautionary-tales.bandcamp.com or via streaming services.

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