Fleshvessel: Yearning – Promethean Fates Sealed
Out 28th July on I, Voidhanger, cassette version out 25th August on Xenoglossy
What’s perhaps most striking about ‘Yearning: Promethean Fates Sealed’ is how it makes us feel as if we have never heard progressive death metal played properly before. The foundational classics of the genre were certainly rich artistically, but they remain compelling in part as a study in musicians living beyond their means, not just for the Nocturnuses of the world, but even Atheist, Death, and Pestilence were wont to miss their mark either stylistically or technically at times.
The topography of progressive metal today presents a very different landscape, one where machinelike precision is the expected norm, crystalline mixes, adept, studied musicianship, flawless execution, and highly curated sound spaces are industry standard. Mundanity ensues. An audience gorging itself on such ruthlessly dense sterility has come to not only expect but celebrate progressive metal following certain formulas, meeting pre-agreed standards. The result is the exact opposite to what the ”progressive” credo implies. A circular, self contained environment where new ideas, surprises, mistakes, happy accidents, spontaneity, all are freeze-dried out of the process, fixing the genre in place.
Fleshvessel bypass this paralysis by approaching their craft from a slightly different angle. Here me out: progressive metal with programmed drums. You wouldn’t think it listening to Fleshvessel’s debut album, but such a thing is not only possible but almost indistinguishable from the real thing (for us philistines at least), and it must have taken fucking ages. But beyond this, the rich array of real instrumentation they apply to their craft from flutes, piano, harp, woodwinds, – beyond the high-fidelity sound of the bass and guitars – this is more in keeping with full blooded 70s progressive rock from the heyday of the genre.
The space ‘Yearning: Promethean Fates Sealed’ occupies is every bit as curated as comparable progressive metal releases. But Fleshvessel come across as a progressive rock band that just happens to employ distorted guitars and vocals, and the occasional death metal riff by happenstance. They lean into the unpredictable, showy, outrageously over the top meanders of the genre’s creation myths with gusto. Given the quality of musicianship on display and the richness of the production, we know that this is an artist entirely in control of events, but they make a show of allowing their ability, ambition, and zeal to run away with itself, giving rise to a theatrical and over the top display of music for its own sake in a way that would delight prog fans.
From a linear thread, one musician will pick up on the smallest tangent or accent and wrest the piece in that direction, until the entire composition has been forced into a violent left turn, weaving its way around a multiplicity of divergent threads before pulling itself back together. An experience akin to having a conversation with someone laying out multiple concurrent trains of thought at once.
But first and foremost, ‘Yearning: Promethean Fates Sealed’ is an album of artistically (as opposed to technically) orientated compositions. There is none of the disjointed linearity found in traditional garden variety progressive metal. They follow any idea, however incidental, through to a usually painful conclusion, but there are ideas, there is an overarching logical order guiding the hand of this music. This is in stark contrast to much contemporary prog metal that favours slick, self aware presentations, a pretence of dense esoterica ultimately boiling down to convoluted platforms for showcasing musicianship within strictly defined borders. Fleshvessel, for all their bombast and willingness to indulge their every whim, are therefore a welcome breath of fresh air in a field where novelty without context is fast becoming an immovable sterility.
Ar’lyxkq’wr: R’ynn’wr(yx)
Out 27th July on Centipede Abyss
A crackling, disjointed, fragmented collection of percussive assaults and dissonant guitars collaborate in creating this hostile sound world. The debut album from Ar’lyxkq’wr is the expression of contradiction itself, a formula that won’t resolve itself. It borrows from a long tradition of alchemy between technical death metal, avant-garde, and jazz. The parts have been thrown into the air and have fallen at random, but rather than attempt to pick up the pieces in a coherent order, Ar’lyxkq’wr simply throw them into the air again, resulting in a relentless cacophony of the illogical.
‘R’ynn’wr(yx)’ is part of a growing breed of borderline technical death metal releases – loosely descended from Gorguts’ ‘Obscura’ – seeking to bend the form to breaking point, dissolving the formalism of its antecedents into an artefact somewhere between noise, jazz, and extreme metal. The accompanying aesthetic – the fluorescent green colour scheme, the artificial, coded song titles, the warped, mutated imagery – is more aligned to extreme electronica than metal. And it may be more instructive to view this from a decidedly non-metallic angle. The songs take the avant-garde requirement seriously. Unlike a lot of metal laying claim to this label that simply applies quirks or forced novelty to otherwise pedestrian metal forms, Ar’lyxkq’wr seek to disintegrate the very vocabulary of metal.
The jolting, stop-start drums look as if they were lifted from an entirely different recording. The guitars have abandoned the project of riffing altogether, instead seeking layers of disjointed noise, sometimes crafted from feedback and droning chords, sometimes by sustained, tremolo picked dissonance. They make a point of offering no rhythmic or cadential logic for the drums to follow, refusing to connect up in any chronological structure. Vocals are equally anomic, providing little more than a distorted barrage of exclamations, the reason of which is unlocatable.
There’s little to recommend this project in the way of pleasure to be garnered. Even when taken against Jared Moran’s many other projects (Out of the Mouth of Graves, Acausal Intrusion, and Vertebrae Fetish Totem to name a few) Ar’lyxkq’wr is a tough nut to crack. It may be expressed through guitars and drums, but ultimately ‘R’ynn’wr(yx)’ is a work more philosophically aligned with noise and extreme IDM than metal. Despite extreme metal valuing rampant chaos, it is a genre closely married to a set of strictly enforced rules, all of which this album seeks to break without undertaking any project of reconstruction. A feast for the intellect more than the heart.
Decoherence: Order
Out 28th July on Sentient Ruin
I think industrial black metal just got normalised. It took far longer than the normal lifecycle of a genre for it to happen, but that seems par for the course in these chronologically warped times we live in. Cyber black metal, or black metal with industrial, sci-fi or modernist leanings has been around for a long time. From the mechanistic occultism of Black Funeral, to the slick futurism of Thorns, the nihilistic blackened grind of Zyklon-B, and of course the marriage of dissonant black metal, post metal, and Godflesh that came to define the career of Blut Aus Nord.
Despite this rich history, until the arrival of Blut Aus Nord, there was never really a standard operating procedure for this subgenre, no thesis from which to begin building an antithesis. A disparate, unconnected collection of artists from many different scenes all dabbled in different interpretations of how to make this union work, from the brittle Anglo grimness of Axis of Perdition, to the grindcore Dragonforce of Anaal Nathrkh, or the abortive avant-gardism of Dødheimsgard, nothing connected them aside from a meshing of extreme metal with vaguely cyber themed tropes.
And so it went for some years. But with the coming of Decoherence’s latest work ‘Order’ (along with comparable albums from the likes of Skrying Mirrow) it must surely be recognised now that the genre has begun to live in the shadow of Blut Aus Nord. This isn’t a watershed release necessarily, just the slow realisation that whatever prospects lay in the subgenre’s tentative but undeniably promising early steps have now resigned themselves to a formulaic concoction of chasmic programmed drums, dissonant but followable riffs, artificially distorted vocals, heavy handed reverb, and static electronic noise deployed with just enough vigour to appear “edgy” without upsetting the accessible pomp and groove that would put off a prospective larger audience unaccustomed to experimental music.
‘Order’ is not patient zero here, but it slots neatly into – and contributes to – a growing homogenisation that overtakes all genres eventually. The acceptance that certain boxes must be ticked, because audiences have reached a state of awareness, creating expectations. There are avenues of escape. The recent offering from Benthik Zone comes to mind for its application of industrial textures and rhythms to fast paced black metal in compellingly creative ways. But ‘Order’ feels like a statement of resignation to familiarity. The hallmarks of industrial black metal have been established, and Decoherence – both sonically and thematically – are adept at playing up to them.
It’s an album that fulfils its brief faultlessly. The flat feeling it leaves us with must therefore be interrogated from the angle of the brief itself. The stagnation and risk free reward that comes with meeting an audience’s expectations.
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