The new album from Flourishing is not for kids, unless they’re kids who grew up fast and hard. It’s not happy music. It’s not party music. It won’t get your head bobbing very often. It’s not music that you’ll be running through the speakers in your mind days later. It won’t lift you up. It’s the sound of catastrophe, the sound of everything falling apart. It will roll over you and break you down.

It’s not music you can really use as background to anything else you’re doing either — it compels you to listen as it grinds over your frail person like some massive machine made for smashing human bones and flesh. I suppose the one thing you could do while listening is launch yourself into a mosh pit with violence on your mind, but that’s about it.

I have no good idea about how to classify this music within standard genre references. At times, it sounds like some kind of virulent black grind — a kind of Anaal Nathrakh-like misanthropic rending, except with more sludge. At times, industrial rhythms take hold in the low end, but if it’s industrial, it’s the sound of a deafening factory that’s consuming itself in an effusion of oily smoke.

At other times, it sounds like a dismembering kind of progressive metal, as in the last part of a song called “In Vivid Monochrome”. In certain stretches, it reminds me of the harrowing brand of hardcore-influenced venom delivered by Pristina (whose last album we reviewed here). At still others, it sounds like a catastrophic cascade of avant-garde experimental metal, reminiscent of Ulcerate.  (more after the jump . . .) Continue reading »