Big shout-out to Anton for first putting Fleshvessel on all of our radars. Bile of Man Reborn was one hell of an opening salvo back in 2020, and their proper debut Yearning: Promethean Fates Sealed was an even more eye-popping experience to behold, fully blowing apart the shabby, rotten joints that held together even the smallest semblance of genre apart. Well known for their experimentation with sounds, styles and instruments, the NOLA-based collective have now put out their second full-length, the thematic sister composition to Yearning, and I am quite overdue for reviewing it. But then again, it’s gonna take time for anyone to be able to digest Obstinacy: Sisyphean Dreams Unfolded.
A hallmark of Fleshvessel’s music is their commitment to fully-orchestrated compositions featuring a truly mind-boggling amount of instrumentation to fill the sonic space. Beyond your standard guitar, bass, synthesizer and drums, we have returning on Obstinacy the usual suspects like bassoon, clarinet, and flute (wild that those are *usual* for Fleshvessel), as well as the musical saw, the Puerto Rican tres and cuatro (guitar-esque stringed instruments), the phin (a lute-like instrument from Thailand), sleigh bells, maracas, rainsticks and, uh…metal spatula? And that barely even scratches the surface. All of these instruments are precisely arranged in a way that blends a base coating of death metal with prog, tech and black metal elements, as well as jazz, classical and the usual go-to when all attempts at classification fail, avant garde. The musical goal for Obstinacy was to surpass Yearning in “creative madness” and it seems at this Fleshvessel have succeeded wildly. The cornucopia of sounds and textures presented here is even more vibrant and expressive than the band’s previous releases, and while this all may sound a little outlandish to the uninitiated, I have to say, one of the finest things about Fleshvessel is how grounded in metal all these extra flourishes are. The songs here may go soaring off into space at times, but the foundation is solid, and the groundwork laid down by the guitars and drums give everything else a point to reference and a home base to return to. Obstinacy is by no means easily accessible, but if you’re willing to give it a chance and you don’t mind a LOT of experimentation, it’s far from incoherent ramblings for their own sake.
“Am” is a perfect example of what I mean. The riffs that pop up throughout the song are absolutely killer, and no one could mistake this for anything other than *metal* metal. But then you get an almost 70’s prog meets 60’s folk interlude led by woodwinds and piano and backed up by a melodic bass groove before lurching back into double bass pedals and chugging guitars. “Cessation Fixation” opens with another killer, groovy bass motif that the band builds on and embellishes over the course of almost nine minutes with lots of variations on the theme, covering everything from lumbering post-metal to groovy acid jazz, but always keeping that sense of feel and that original theme in mind. And as much as the instrumentation takes off in wild directions, the vocals provided by keyboardist Troll Hart are expanded even more on Obstinacy, with roaring bellows supplemented now by spoken word narration and King Diamond-ass falsetto shrieks. Of all the things on Obstinacy that could put off those not in the know, the vocals are probably it, but if you think about these songs as being compositions, the vocals fit in with the orchestration like opera vocals do. And hey…Fleshvessel are already kind of a pretentious band anyway (said with love, of course). The vocals don’t exactly change much.
Obstinacy: Sisyphean Dreams Unfolded is an album that is going to take time and repeated listens to really unpack, but if you do, you are going to be rewarded by music that is truly and honestly unlike anything else that is out there. If any band could be said to be operating at a higher wavelength than their peers, it’s Fleshvessel; their genius when it comes to composing and arranging in so many styles and with so many instruments cannot be overstated. I’m glad they’ve made their brand so weird, and I can only hope that things get weirder from here on out.
— Ian
Obstinacy: Sisyphean Dreams Unfolded is available now on I, Voidhanger Records. For more information on Fleshvessel, visit their Facebook page.