(written by Islander)
The Polish blackened sludge metal band Fiasko gave the world the first tastes of their new album AMOK ꓘOMA through videos for two of the album tracks, “Wniwecz” (“Into Naught”) and “Sztuczne kwiaty” (“Fake Flowers).
In the first of those, Fiasko showed their current colors in a slow-moving display of miserably moaning and wailing melody, backed by gut-punching percussive blows — and then they shock the listener with a sudden detonation of blasting drums, frantically swarming riffage (which still sounds dismal but vastly more deranged), and furious screams.
In that typhoon surge of sound you can still detect the grim opening melody, but it has been spun up into something substantially more frightening, and as the riffing evolves, it becomes both more feverishly unhinged and more disturbingly agonized. Even the sudden singing sounds emotionally shattered, elevating into screams again.
A delirious guitar solo, crashing cymbals, and swarming and scything guitars keep the intensity level high, as do the skull-smacking beats and gritty snarls.
The video that delivered the song is as gripping, mentally mutilating, and frightening to watch to watch as the music is to hear.
The second single, “Sztuczne kwiaty“, pulls no punches either. Both heavily heaving and brazenly expansive at first, it segues into slashing chords that are electrifying (and viciously catchy), spine-jarring bass-lines, bone-cracking drums, and another dose of come-for-your-throat vocal savagery.
The guitars sizzle in their heated translations of desperation but also ring like piercing chimes of sorrow as the bass gloomily throbs. The drums explode in blasts too, and the music also assaults in unsettling bursts, like the fast shattering of souls. At the end, we get balalaika-like trills and folkloric picking, a fascinating finale.
Now we have for you a stream of the album as a whole — all eight songs — which we’re co-premiering with MetalNews.pl. As the band say, these tracks are “about death and love, love for death and the death of love.”
The first two singles were intense, dynamic, and unsettling in multiple ways, creating sensations of fury, pain, hopelessness, and yearning. They hit damned hard, with heavyweight punch, gattling-gun ferocity, and soul-baring vocals, but were equally devoted to emotionally evocative melodies. The other six songs demonstrate that those two songs weren’t outliers.
They too deftly intertwine the dark moods, bruising heft, and raw vocals of sludge with the explosive aggressiveness and goblin-screams of black metal, and they’re equally devoted to expressions of pitch-black mood.
They’re also patterned with filigrees of instrumental and even folkloric flair, letting the guitars emerge in ringing tones both fierce and forlorn, making room for the bass to solo and warmly murmur as well as bludgeon, and un-tethering the drummer from any dull constancy.
The tremolo’d riffs cut like sharp-toothed circle saws as well as providing bright traceries of agony in various quite memorable shades. The vocals are a nearly non-stop cavalcade of ravishing intensity, though they sometimes divert into grim and gritty spoken words and wailing song.
And sludge and black metal aren’t the only musical ingredients in play here, as you’ll find from almost all the songs but perhaps especially “VII krag“, which might be the album’s most stylistically diverse (and depressive) song but also one of the best. Post-metal comes to mind, but that’s not all.
Which leads to a point that should be underscored: As bleak as the album definitely is, there’s a lot to discover within it, with some kind of surprise around nearly every corner, many of which we haven’t mentioned — so as not to spoil them.
And with that, we invite you to set aside time enough to move through this remarkable record from start to finish:
FIASKO is:
Mielnik – lead vocals, lyrics
Kozina – guitar
Michułka – guitar
Nawrot – bass guitar, backing vocals
Walczak – drums (session)
All instruments for AMOK ꓘOMA were recorded with Mikołaj Kiciak at Santa Studio. The vocals were recorded at Burning Tones by Adam Ziółkowski, who is also responsible for mixing the album. The recording was then mastered by Haldor Grunberg at Satanic Audio (Behemoth, Me and that Man, Gruzja, Thaw).
The artwork to AMOK ꓘOMA was created by Robert A. von Ritter (Hooded Menace, Urfaust, Malokarpatan, Outre, In Twilight’s Embrace) while the album’s booklet layout and design is the work of Paweł Marzec of Kontamination Design (Dimmu Borgir, Morbus Chron, Blaze of Perdition, Manbryne).
AMOK ꓘOMA will be released by Fiasko on November 15th in jewelcase CD format and via all major streaming platforms. It will also be available for purchase via Godz ov War Productions and Malignant Voices.
PRE-ORDER:
https://fiaskopolo.bandcamp.com/album/amok-oma
https://godzovwar.com/shop/en/pre-order/8833-fiasko-amok-oma-cd.html
http://sklep.malignantvoices.com/fiasko-amok-koma-cd-p-2949.html
FIASKO online:
https://www.facebook.com/fiaskopl/
https://www.instagram.com/fiaskopl/
https://fiaskopolo.bandcamp.com/
https://open.spotify.com/artist/7zSkoAIc5lQhXjnbwXlGFh