Flourishing - The Sum of All Fossils (2011)^{Release ID: 32207}

The crashing and bashing tendencies of some death metal bands is not something that is always done to a reasonably high enough standard.  When I hold such bands as Gorguts in the highest of regard then the bar is already set pretty high for avant-garde death metal.  I will go on record as saying that Flourishing never hit the dizzy heights of Obscura on The Sum of All Fossils yet at the same time they do make a thoroughly entertaining record in the process.  The urgency of the tempo that is set by album opener Thimble's Worth manages to set out a consistent taster for what is to come across the rest of their 2011 offering.  What the band do particularly well is vary the pacing and tempo to give the album a real sense of dexterity.

The post-hardcore elements do not always work I admit and can lead to a sense of confusion or a rush of ideas all coming to a head in one place in particular.  That being said I do get a real sense of there being a lot of thought behind the album, like time has been taken in the main to measure content and space it really well in terms of the arrangements as opposed to always pile tings on top of one another.  The production job both helps and hinders this I feel.  For the majority of the record there is a sense of a thin layer of murk just suppressing the content a little and not perhaps letting everything breathe as organically as the band may like based on their arrangements but at the same time the slower parts are given lots of room to build and present their more subtle nuances.

Flourishing could play though and there is very little on here not to get your head around as the band vary things up more than enough.  It is not exceptionally technical overall and in fact relies on some quite simplistic repetition to provide build and crescendo in all honesty.  Their playing just contains a solid amount of consistency that avoids sloppiness without ever becoming overly impressive.  Whilst there are no weak tracks, there are many tracks that end up at the same place making track-blur a real problem.  For an album that is weighted with the opportunity to rip up the rulebook to some degree it seems to somehow set its own limitations still on far they can actually take things.  In so many ways I am torn between the comfort of the familiarity of it but also the lack of full-on bat-shit-crazy, spazzing that they never quite hit.  The guitar flurries that open Momentary Senses are intriguing but do not play a big enough part in the track overall to realise that initial promise.  Bits of The Sum of All Fossils tend to dominate other parts all too easily and those vocals cannot always keep up with everything that is going on, despite the measured approach and the obvious sense of arrangement there is still work to be done here.  Interesting but not essential.

Well this was really interesting and a pleasant surprise. After the first few bars I thought we were in for another dissonant release of the kind I struggle with, but although this does dabble with dissonant elements, it has more going on than just that. Here Flourishing infuse their death metal with elements from outside of metal circles, post-punk and noise rock for example, and so provide, at least in my experience, a unique and refreshing take on extreme metal. The Sum of All Fossils is an album of contrasting textures, but that work together exceedingly well, be it the cloying and suffocating layers of their dissonant death metal, or the more expansive post-punk-inspired sections and the abrasiveness of the noise rock / post-hardcore passages. The transitions between these various textural contrasts are also handled masterfully. There was quite a few times when I was reminded of Akercocke's Words That Go Unspoken, Deeds That Go Undone album, particularly with how some of the transitions were handled.

The vocals feel a little buried at times, which isn't so much of a problem for the death growls (which often sound to be more of a black metal shriek), but the post-hardcore cleans sound a bit like they are fighting against the tide. The band's use of dissonance isn't especially overbearing, luckily for me as I find an excess of dissonance to be off-putting, but is tempered by the more melodic passages derived from the non-metal genres. Technically, it all sounds very much to my non-musician's ear like these guys know their way around their instruments and the songwriting is adventurous and exhilarating.

For me, this was a genuine revelation and although it isn't a perfect release for my particular sensibilities, it is one that has impressed me mightily and is definitely one I can see me revisiting in the future.

I remember giving this sole 2011 album from short-lived New York death metallers Flourishing a couple of spins back at the time of release & found it to be quite enjoyable however it didn’t quite captivate me enough to see me returning to it since so the prospect of a return visit to month’s The Horde feature releases was something I welcomed in order to see whether my affections had grown over time. The dissonant death metal crowd is chock full of Gorguts clones that may attempt all sorts of adventurous melodic & harmonic experimentation but rarely manage to identify themselves from the crowd. Flourishing on the other hand offer something a little left of field by incorporating a number of unusual influences which gives them a refreshing differentiator. There’s no question that the basis for their sound has been developed using the building blocks that Gorguts & Ulcerate have popularized however the band regularly stray into uncharted territories that are more reminiscent of an abrasive Godflesh sludge-fest, Sonic Youth’s super-cool take on noise rock or the post-hardcore adventures of bands like At The Drive-In or Fugazi.

Front man Garrett Bussanick possesses a raspy & tortured howl that’s pretty similar to Asphyx’s Martin van Drunen & he does an admirable job at keeping things deathly no matter how far the instrumentation drifts outside of that space too. Garrett’s dissonant guitar work regularly employs the use of natural harmonics to great effect, a tool that immediately sees my ears pricking up due to the similarities to Godflesh mastermind Justin Broadrick’s innovative take on the technique. The heavily down-tuned & distorted bass guitar tone of Eric Rizk also has Godlfesh written all over it & I have to say that I really dig it. Unfortunately drummer Brian Corcoran isn’t quite up to the requirements here which ultimately sees Flourishing leaving a portion of their potential on the table. If you threw a tier one extreme metal drummer into the mix then I feel that “The Sum Of All Fossils” had the potential to be much stronger but Corcoran sounds like his technique & creativity were capping out here which is a real shame. The murky production hasn’t done him any favours but it admittedly works really well for the other two musicians.

At the end of the day I can’t deny that I’m really intrigued by the eccentricities “The Sum Of All Fossils” contains however it doesn’t quite manage to hit my sweet spot consistently enough to warrant my higher scores which has no doubt been contributed to by my struggles with Corcoran. Flourishing’s more dissonant & deathly material is generally at a slightly lower standard to their more expansive excursions through alternate genres but it’s nonetheless a very consistent record that offers plenty to analyse & dissect.

For fans of Aeviterne, Pyrrhon & Gigan.