Album review: Fleurety “Inquietum”
Norway’s extreme metal band Fleurety offers us a career-spanning and genre-bending collection of rather avant-garde songs on “Inquietum”.
Norwegian band Fleurety plays experimental black metal with a focus on experimental and avant-garde music. Their catalogue of songs takes us to places where many other black metal bands would never go. It combines old-school black metal with some fantastic technical extreme metal, avant-garde influences from all sorts of musical genres and atmospheric soundscapes.
“Inquietum” is a CD collection of songs from throughout the band’s career, previously released as four separate seven-inch EPs, which partly explains the many variations between the different songs. Formed in Norway in 1991, Fleurety is led by guitarist Alexander Nordgaren (ex-I Left the Planet and also a former live member of Mayhem) and drummer and vocalist Svein Egil Hatlevik (Zweizz, Umoral, ex-Dodheimsgard).
The album opens with “Descent into Darkness” and that sets the scene for this collection of songs. Some of the songs can be traced back to the band’s early demo recordings from the 1990s, but presented here in newer versions. While varied, the music is always dark in one way or another. Some of this music is tormented and twisted, while other parts are beautifully atmospheric, yet still dark, haunting and damp. This band is not afraid of going wherever they feel like with their music. That takes some of these songs into unexpected territories.
“Absence” is a fantastically extreme metal track presented in a primitive demo-sounding format that has a great groove to it, not least provided by guest bassist Plenum (Virus, Audiopain). On “Summon the Beasts”, we get a very different Fleurety, here reunited with fabulous female vocalist Ayna B. Johansen (I Left The Planet). This is the album’s best track. Many other prominent guests appear on some of the songs, most notably legendary Mayhem members Necrobutcher and Hellhammer on the track “Descent into Darkness”.
This is a very interesting album which tracks the band’s evolution and different musical styles as well as reminding us of Norwegian black metal’s rich history and deep roots.
Fleurety’s album “Inquietum” is out now on Aesthetic Death Records.
