ALBUM REVIEW: Fleurety's 'Inquietum'
With such choice lyrical yarns as “Salvation comes through your asshole,” you’d be correct in assuming Fleurety follow a rather less conventional stylistic route than most. And indeed, as a record that’s violently teeming and pulsating with all manner of curiously alien, ambient trappings, migraine-inducing caustic textures and demonic gurgling, few experimental artists so thoroughly and instantly unsettle the listener.
Having featured a rich variety of guest musicians extracted from such blackened legends as Mayhem since its inception back in 1991, the aptly-titled ‘Inquietum’ is unsurprisingly awash with evidence of these craggy, coldly immersive trademarks. Take, for example, ‘Absence’s’ bristling multitude of abrasive textures or the towering, blackly majestic riffs and pummelling throes of ‘Descent Into Darkness’. Indelicately spliced with sultry lashings of brimstone-scorched rock, bone-scraping industrial noise and haunting layers of distortion, theirs is a curious and relentlessly shifting amalgam of influences.
Among the record’s various glimmers of compositional ingenuity, the richly atmospheric ‘Carnal Nations’ sees an eerie web of disparate strings display coldly immersive intensity above a pummelling haze of snares while ‘Summon The Beasts’ is pleasingly thick with darkly expansive rock trappings. That said, there’s a nagging tendency toward rather crudely minimalist and repetitious filler that, coupled with its less than razor-sharp production values, feels decidedly plodding in places. In short, it’s an imperfect but pleasingly varied experimental offering.
'Inquietum' is out now on Aesthetic Death