Review by UnhinderedbyTalent for Flourishing - The Sum of All Fossils (2011)

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.