Band:	Fleshvessel
Album:	Yearning: Promethean Fates Sealed
Style:	Avantgarde metal, Experimental death metal, Progressive death metal
Release date:	July 2023

01. Winter Came Early
02. Promethean: Vignette I
03. A Stain
04. Fates: Vignette II
05. The Void Chamber
06. Yearning: Vignette III
07. Eyes Yet To Open

Few bands get nominated for the Metal Storm Awards for their first album; far fewer get nominated just for their first song, but that’s what the maniacs in Fleshvessel accomplished in 2020 with the one-song debut EP Bile Of Man Reborn. An impressive achievement, and one that sets expectations high for their first full-length record.

The 25-minute bonanza that is Bile Of Man Reborn was nominated in the Extreme Progressive Metal category, but it could arguably have gone into Avantgarde/Experimental Metal instead, and Yearning: Promethean Fates Sealed will result in the same conundrum. This is an album that shares extensive musical overlap with established prog rock and prog metal; at the same time, the sheer weirdness of Fleshvessel’s compositional style, which incorporates influences from jazz, classical music and more cacophonic metal acts, gives the group a unique identity that can’t be easily compared to any one particular band or niche. To the surprise of probably no one that hears this record, the group are signed to I, Voidhanger Records (what better home for unconventional, demented, extreme metal such as this), and with Yearning, they further demonstrate themselves to be one of the hottest rising acts on one of the hottest metal labels.

The record features 7 tracks, but three of these are “Vignettes”, each lasting for less than two minutes, and comprised of non-metallic instrumentation (“Promethean” and “Yearning” are predominantly piano pieces, while “Fates” features an acoustic stringed instrument and sounds like it could have been part of The Godfather’s soundtrack). These interludes provide breathers between the four ‘main’ songs on Yearning, and given the sensory overload each of those tracks provides, perhaps a breather is justified. When you first start listening to the album, you might be initially hoodwinked into thinking all this talk of chaos and cacophony above is hyperbole; “Winter Came Early” opens in misleadingly muted style, delicate piano, violin and other instruments building a melancholic yet ominous atmosphere. After a few minutes, however, the song slowly descends into anarchy.

Yearning: Promethean Fates Sealed has a distinctive sound to it, just like Bile Of Man Reborn did; part of it comes from the relatively lo-fi production that stretches of it have, and part of it comes from the deep, revolting growls (which alternate with higher-pitched shrieks). The production adds a fitting 70s feel to the retro-prog rock sequence with flute and acoustic guitars, but also it accentuates the wonky feeling to the slightly oddball lead guitar tone in the passages during which Fleshvessel gradually intensify the sound, and it gives an old-school roughness to the jagged death metal when it finally arrives. There are a litany of instruments that the quartet behind Fleshvessel are credited with (curiously, though, none of those instruments are drums, which are instead programmed), and the first full-on burst of death metal extremity on the record is accompanied by a frantic wind instrument (clarinet, I’m guessing), which goes all over the place before shifting into a harmony with a guitar lead that slides into the mix out of nowhere. The ending of this track sees frenetic programmed drums, demented growls, saloon-style piano, and a cacophony of guitar and wind instrument solos collectively overwhelming the senses.

“Winter Came Early” is quite unidirectional; it starts off soft, with conventional prog rock passages, before gradually intensifying and ramping up the discordant arrangements. “A Stain” and “The Void Chamber” have more fluctuations within their runtimes, and make things weird in their own ways. “A Stain” opens eerily with meandering woodwind that clashes with first the acoustic and then metallic accompaniments, while the fretless bass is more audible in the mix and imparts a tech-death vibe to the bludgeoning death metal. This song is perhaps the one in which the metal feels most similar to prog-death bands such as Opeth, at least in some of the more double bass-laden grooves, but with chromatic solos and dissonant riffs, the death metal more often exhibits the kind of pure extremity that most prog-death bands don’t descend to. Amidst the intensity, there’s still time for a departure into Between The Buried And Me-style quirkiness and flamboyant synthesizer solos midway through “A Stain”.

On the topic of keyed instruments, a major characteristic of sizeable portions of Yearning: Promethean Fates Sealed is the presence of dramatic piano arrangements, in a way that maybe sends one’s mind to Wreche’s use of piano in extreme metal, but there’s also some more classic prog keyboards as well. Some of those appear in “The Void Chamber”; also appearing in this song are some more traditionally melodic guitar solos and sparse use of semi-chanted clean vocals. Clean vocals and melodic prog instrumentation also occurs in “Eyes Yet To Open”, but despite being the shorter of the pair, “The Void Chamber” feels like it covers more ground in its runtime, with it having a detour midway through with tom-rampaging drums backing up jazzy woodwind and brass arrangements, and a subsequent passage with up-tempo pounding drumming and wacky keyboards that that is far too playful for what has come before and after it.

“Eyes Yet To Open” is comfortably the longest song here, but part of that comes down to it having a lot of ambience in its second half. The first 7 minutes are as unpredictable, wide-ranging and dizzying as the bulk of the preceding material on the album, but after a sustained period of keyboard ambience, the conclusion to the song, and Yearning as a whole, is surprisingly restrained and melodic (aside from a certain free jazz exploration within some of the solos). It’s an unexpected end to an album for which the motto ‘expect the unexpected’ is a mandatory mindset to have when approaching it. Fleshvessel are taking progressive death metal to strange new places, but unlike Barney Gumble’s failed attempts at reimagining barbershop music, Yearning: Promethean Fates Revealed is genuinely imaginative and inspired in a way that few prog albums this year will be able to contend with.