New York’s Flourishing have crafted a fitting soundtrack to the apocalypse with their debut album The Sum of All Fossils. This is vile, misanthropic metal that stretches everywhere from hellish grindcore to progressive metal, blazing an ashen path through the modern metal landscape. This New York based trio keep heavy company; bands like Krallice, Castavet, and Tombs, all who are contributing to one of the most vital and forward thinking metal scenes in the country. Flourishing’s sound is difficult to pin down. There’s touches of industrial, noise, death metal, grind, crushed together and creating something new. The name Flourishing is appropriate here; these are musicians synthesizing all they respect about a genre yet still treading new ground with every brutal track.
Album opener “A Thimble’s Worth” begins with heavy feed back before descending into a grinding blast reminiscent of Napalm Death. A calamitous mix of tech death and grind follows, the bass thrumming like a swarm of bees just below the surface as Garett Bussanick does his best invocation of Barney Greenway. Three quarters of the way in and things slow down, everything syncing up into an absolutely stunning wave of blackened shoegaze, reminiscent of Alcest at their best. Further in, “By Which We’re Cemented” opens up with a wall of grind buttressed by the industrial bass tone of Erik Rizk. Before long things dissolve into a transcendent wall of noise, vocals turning now to a high pitched sing shout while an intricate, yet delicate guitar melody plays off the vocals with an otherworldly fervor. Trading between this and the heavy blast beats that open the track, you can’t quite put your finger on what Flourishing are doing here—but that’s the point. This is music evocative of a thousand genres, yet bound by none.
“Fossil Record” is a brutal slab of death metal with an utterly jaw dropping opening, Cephalic Carnage style guitar work dropping out for a second before vocals kick in and everything is blown to hell. The basswork on this track is extraordinary. Powerful, damaging, reminiscent of the martial tone of Godflesh; it underpins the brutality of this song, an eye of the storm in a sea of swirling guitar and ungodly howls. As the track comes to an end another beautiful shoegaze-esque guitar melody leads things out.
Album closer “As If Bathed in Excellence” trades chantlike vocals with Garett’s burnt out growls. Feverish guitar melodies squirm below the surface as the track slowly builds to it’s cataclysmic midpoint. An old school death metal solo rips the song in two before the bass takes off with the drums. Triumphantly, everything comes together at the end, a fitting end for an album that covers so much ground.
Flourishing’s “The Sum of All Fossils is a true achievement. It takes both skills and tremendous guts to avoid the tired tropes of a genre. Flourishing is an amorphous beast; hard to pin down, harder to classify. Let’s hope more bands follow their lead.
The entire album can be heard via NPR here
http://www.npr.org/2011/07/24/138486681/first-listen-flourishing-the-sum-of-all-fossils
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