Fleurety - Min tid skal komme (1995)^{Release ID: 9355}

Wonderfully creative and experimental black metal that helped break down the firm barriers of all things "true".

Fleurety's Min Tid Skal Komme album sure is an eclectic piece of work. While this album is nearly always categorised as black metal, there are many elements here that are quite distant from the genre's blueprint. The mid-nineties was the period when adventurous musicians decided it was OK to merge the normally elite genre of black metal with other outside influences to well, see what would happen. I'm extremely thankful for this curiosity, as we ended up with wonderful albums such as Ved Buens Ende's Written in Waters, Arcturus' La Masquerade Infernale, Solefald's The Linear Scaffold and of course, Fleurety's Min Tid Skal Komme. This period in some ways saved black metal from an early over-saturated death, and this free and experimental attitude has continued right up to today.

There's something extremely organic about the Fleurety experience. It all sounds like it could have been performed live, with the drums feeling very unprocessed and natural. The music swirls between bizarre progressive soundscapes, experimental rock and atmospheric black metal without coming across as clunky or even strange. It just seems...right! It's as though the band were improvising at times and yet the result is too mesmerising to suggest there wasn't an immense amount of planning involved. One of the unique aspects for the time was the inclusion of a female vocalist and I have to say that Marian Aas Hansen's performance is outstanding, particularly when contrasted to the raspy black metal vocals that on their own may have been a bit too weak. She is apparently a pop singer from Norway and her talent is obvious, never entering overly-operatic tendencies that seem the norm for many female vocal additions in metal.

Alexander's riffs are immensely creative and discordant, and he switches between different styles easily, seemingly having no fear of what should go where. The bass is very audible and holds a much more prominent place than on most black metal albums. There's a lot of talent behind all this madness and I really wish the band had explored these avenues further over the next few years. Min Tid Skal Komme is one of those albums that gets better with time and the more I listen to it, the more enjoyment I find. Fleurety deserve a heck of a lot more credit than they receive for helping break down barriers and exploring musical realms formerly uncharted. Highlight tracks are Fragmenter av en Fortid and the genuinely amazing Englers Piler Har Ingen Brodd. If you like your metal experimental, you owe it to yourself to check this out!

The Confused Screech Of The Avant-Garde

As Black Metal of all shapes and sizes was resurging in the mid-1990's a few bands with a taste for the strange, progressive, and avant-garde would step up to the plate in creating Black Metal that was miles away from where the genre started. Fleurety was one of them, with their take on Black Metal being one of the strangest and most difficult albums to decide what my opinion on it was. While Min tid skall komme certainly has aspects that I like and still sound fresh and unique, there was always something about it that rubbed me the wrong way after thinking about the album as a whole. While the overall theme and sound of the album is interesting, it always caused me to lose my patience about halfway through no matter how many times I revisited it. Its diversity and weirdness feels like it should keep me hooked, but it always ends up turning into a boring slog with admittedly great riff progressions that somehow miss the mark for me. This album has honestly beaten me down to the point where my opinion on it feels considerably conflicted, so let's try to get to the core of this atypical Black Metal release.

Overall Min tid skal komme is divided into two distinct parts, the atmospheric and drawn out first half, and the more uneasy and just flat out weird second half. While the first half revolves around a repeated acoustic chord theme with Black Metal influences coming and going as they please, the second half gets straight to the point with grimy riffs offset with bizarre sound effects, pterodactyl screeching, and pretty silly spoken word. These two halves certainly add some variety and some sort of progression through the album, but I was never really compelled by it with something never quite adding up with how it progresses. It starts off strong enough, with the riff progressions being extremely strong and the first dive into full-on Black Metal being set up nicely by the drums. One of the only aspects that ties Fleurety to Black Metal at first is the vocals, with much of the first half being more akin to Progressive Metal than anything. The first track "Fragmenter Av En Fortid" showcases pretty much everything Fleurety has to offer in the first half of the album, with slow, clean guitar and acoustic sections eventually building up into slow but aggressive Black Metal tremolo with either a harsh male or clean female vocalist. Some of the Black Metal riffs are better than others but the whole affair always feels thin to me, like there's a layer missing. The second track sounds like a complete rehash of the first since it starts out with the exact same acoustic riff and progression, which is a strange choice that was probably made to give a sense of cohesiveness, but it falls flat for me. The rest of the first half is Fleurety abruptly transitioning in and out of Progressive Metal bits that eventually give way to Black Metal climaxes. Even though I like what it's doing it just feels so drawn out that by the time I reach "Engler Piler Har Ingen Brodd" I find myself wholly unimpressed by the heavier riff structure accompanied by Gothic synths. Even though there are so many ideas being thrown around in these extended tracks none of them make a serious impression on me due to how strangely slow and plodding everything becomes.

Once the second half kicks in Min tid skal komme takes a dramatic turn into more focused compositions that highlight the bass even more than the first half. "Fragmenter Av En Fremtid" is beautiful, pulling influences from the very beginning of the album and using the female vocals very well. This is the calm before the storm though, with the rest of the album being much more raw and crazy than anything in the first half beginning with "Absence" and its extremely silly spoken word. Although it creates a strange and creepy atmosphere there was never any chance that I was going to take them seriously, especially towards the end. The rest of the album is filled with blistering Black Metal that follows the same sort of progressive structure, but with less downtime and more bird shrieks. While the harsh vocals in the first half of the album were serviceable to get the Black Metal feel across, the vocals in the final three tracks drift into a realm I've never heard before as they attempt to imitate a prehistoric bird or a car's squeaky brakes. This is one of the cases for me where unique doesn't necessarily equal good, because I personally can't stand them.

Although this album never decided to click for me, Min tid skal komme is still an essential landmark in Black Metal history solely because of its strangeness. The persisting acoustic and clean guitar themes wrapped around the admittedly thin Black Metal sections accompanied by haunting female vocals and bird screeches are definitely something that not a lot of people have experienced. For me, though, a lot of it ends up feeling pointless or annoying after a while, with similar sounding progressive sections being overused and many of the interludes being insignificant. The bass lines, however, are the one aspect that I always enjoyed hearing from this album since it has such a warm and dominant tone through the avant-garde, atmospheric sections as it carries the melody along. It's also always important to remember that the definition of avant-garde is constantly shifting, so it's very difficult for me to look at this album as cutting edge nowadays. I'm sure that this broke down a lot of Black Metal barriers alongside Ved Buens Ende....., but considering Written In Waters didn't do much for me either, I think this strain of strangely unsettling Black Metal simply doesn't work for me.