Fleurety - Min Tid Skall Komme
Aesthetic Death/Misanthropy
Progressive Black Metal
5 songs (44:45)
Release year: 1995
Official Myspace
Reviewed by Charles
Archive review
It must be a strange feeling, travelling for what seems like a long time, only to realise you are back where you started. A friend of mine did it once. He tried to drive back to Derby from Nottingham, only to find himself mysteriously back at the parking spot he’d only just vacated. Each time he tried to make it home, he would be led to the same place, as if an inhuman force was guiding him, directing him inexorably back towards Nottingham Panthers ice hockey arena. In a way, it was; he had forgotten to reset his satnav from the outward journey.

And therein lies a cautionary tale for those of us excitedly watching as black metal weaves its own wondrous voyage into the musical unknown, hailing such trailblazers as Enslaved, Nachtmystium, and seemingly everybody’s pick for album of 2009, Cobalt. We tend to assume that metal genres go in cycles. They might start off brutal and raw, and then maybe become more sophisticated and interwoven with other forms. Then, before too long, perhaps there will be a primitivist reaction that brings back “the roots” and puts interlocked strands back in the boxes they came from, like punk slaying the prog dragon all over again. But albums like this one remind us that those roots were always complicated in the first place.

Fleurety’s first release back in 1993, the Black Snow EP, was curious enough, with otherworldly drones, ear-abusing blasts of noise and truly horrifying vocals lending it an avant-garde sensibility that you might say is inherent to all the most extreme black metal. But when we get to this debut album, we find something else entirely, and barely black metal at all; a thoughtful and forward-thinking record. Some elements of it are very close to Bergtatt,which was released in the same year, with a stripped-down but not abrasive guitar tone and mournful clean voices picking out shivering, folky melodies. But the ambitiously, ambiguously constructed flow of the female-vocal lines often puts them closer to extreme-proggy outliers In the Woods…. Weirder still are the uplifting and delicate acoustic passages that are strongly evocative of another important debut from that year, Orchid. The compositional structure is also heavily Opeth-ian, with lengthy tracks constructed from a shifting collage of alternately gentle and metallic ideas. It’s only after listening to this that you realise how strange it is to regard early Ulver and early Opeth as inhabiting entirely separate metal worlds.

But it’s not enough to just put this down as a straddler of different genres. It has a truly unpredictable quality to it at times, with oddities such as the chiming percussion and out-of-the-blue piano interjections in En skikkelse i horisonte being strange enough to give even its most conventional passages an air of mystery. This is not to mention the curious bass/guitar unison neoclassical broken chord flourishes that surface sporadically throughout, or the near-funky slap bass that sleazes up Englers piler har ingen.

Min Tid Skall Komme is an album that will not be pinned down, which is something to treasure. There are times when it feels slightly lightweight, particularly in its more black metal gestures which may be found wanting in comparison the ferocity of Mayhem or Emperor’s efforts of the same period. But then, this may be a consequence of valuing exploration over perfecting a sound. It is a record that deserves revisiting, particularly for anyone wishing to celebrate black metal’s natural curiosity.

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Charles quoted 90 / 100
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