OKLAHOMA CITY – The cover of “For a Moment I Was Warm,” the second – and allegedly final – full-length album from genre-straddling OKC art-rocker Donovan Funk, is about as simple and raw as can be.
It’s a photo of him and his telecaster together on the Speakeasy stage, frozen in a moment of all-on-the-field performance now faded and saturated like an old Polaroid.
No magic, no mysterious aura or After Effects, just a stripped-down, true-to-life photo of an artist, which is to say that it’s on a completely different end of the spectrum from his 2022 standout, “Subjective Reality,” with its gothic glam and hazy, “Mellon Collie” aesthetics.
But it’s also the best and most immediate possible representation of the music held within and of Funk’s own evolution in his sound and fury over the intervening years.
While “Subjective Reality” played gleefully with expectations from track-to-track, hopping between art-rock styles, grungy attitudes, and theatrical affectations to create one of the best local records of its year, “For a Moment…” instead commits to its singular atmosphere and commits itself to its own pitch-black depths.
And in doing so, Funk once again drops one of the year’s strongest Oklahoman albums.
That simplistic photograph on the cover, it turns out, is no throwaway, last-minute selection. It’s a thesis for the whole record.
The songs on “For a Moment I Was Warm” are just as raw, just as unprocessed, and just as vulnerably faded and worn. They feel lived-in and breathing.
These songs are notably slower, immediately darker, and showing no concern for showiness. Each track rolls at its own natural pace, the focus always firmly on the organic elements that make it up, the metallic pluck of a string, the close breath in Funk’s voice, or the crack against a snare tuned tight as a tourniquet and dry as a funeral drum.
There are plenty of subtly floating synth textures and reverbs kissing everything in sight, but even for all of the slowness and patience and atmosphere here, this is decidedly not the kind of effect-laden, zoned-out, dissociated dream-pop that the kids insist on calling “shoegaze” for some reason.
No, “For a Moment…” is something different. Its atmospheres are earned. Its hooks and powers don’t kick the door in, rather they just work to slowly claw their way through.
The melodies are built most often on cleverly interplaying guitars that snake and twist around one another with Funk’s own playing complemented at every turn by longtime guitarist Robin Rhoades.
Each song, just like the album’s art, is a snapshot, less of a moment than of a feeling captured in a frame by Funk’s lyricism, always just as raw and unfiltered as that cover shot. He turns his lens to feelings of stubborn futility, self-loathing, and inadequacy, but framed within frozen-in-time scenes of family reflections and heads stuck out of car windows.
Every one of those elements comes together especially well, in fact, on downtempo epic “Lack Thereof.”
Taken all together, with those winding, angular guitar lines, despondent snapshots and poetic scenery, and the slow-motion urgency that propels every song, the whole album takes the form of something like a post-punk dirge, like an Echo and the Bunnymen 45 played at 33rpm or like the best old Red House Painters albums re-amped through a distortion pedal or two.
And in a way, it actually kind of is a dirge.
Funk has made it clear that “For a Moment I Was Warm” will be the final album attributed to “Donovan Funk” as a solo artist, but not his last outing as a songwriter and a performer.
The band that Funk has developed and tightened over the past of handful of years with Rhoades, bassist Jarrod Lovick, and his brother, drummer Conner Funk, is set to become a brand new, proper band, one free from the name and perspective of just one person.
And that means that “For a Moment…” is something of a curtain call for that name and perspective, allowing Donovan the chance to create something singularly and pointedly personal as an exit for this current iteration of his music and of his solo persona.
A lot of artists would take that opportunity and create as lavish and grand a farewell as they could muster, pulling out all the stops and cramming in every flight of musical fancy that they’ve ever wanted to explore in their own solo material.
Donovan Funk does the opposite.
“For a Moment I Was Warm” is a portrait – or a Polaroid – of an artist stripping all that pretense away to shine a naked light on who he is, simply and vulnerably, as a songwriter.
“For a Moment I Was Warm” by Donovan Funk is available on streaming services now from Mystery Class Records.
Friday, December 5th will see Funk and the band on stage at Resonant Head to celebrate the album’s release with support from Douglas and Panhandle. For more, visit resonanthead.com.
You can find out about local music and performance happenings in the OKC metro weekly in this music column by Brett Fieldcamp. | Brought to you by True Sky Credit Union.
Brett Fieldcamp is the owner and Editor in Chief of Oklahoma City Free Press. He has been covering arts, entertainment, news, housing, and culture in Oklahoma for nearly two decades and served as Arts & Entertainment Editor before purchasing the company from founder Brett Dickerson in 2026.
He is also a musician and songwriter and holds a certification as Specialist of Spirits from The Society of Wine Educators.
