Anyone can make a concept album (which is not to say that it’s easy, but that it doesn’t depend on a particular musical style). That said, when it comes to the rock-opera-style concept album, the tendencies towards elaborate instrumental explorations and grand, dramatic spectacle often found in progressive rock and metal, provide particularly fertile ground. Pink Floyd, Queensryche, The Who, and many others have followed this path (coloured by their own particular musical approaches).
On their debut full-length album, Yearning: Promethean Fates Sealed (I,Voidhanger Records), Chicago progressive metal four-piece Fleshvessel have created their own take on the rock opera. The thematic source of inspiration? Well, as the title indicates, Prometheus, the classic tale of the titan who stole fire from the gods and gave it to man.
To do justice to Fleshvessel and Yearning: Promethean Fates Sealed requires quite a bit more unpacking. First off, “progressive metal” is not quite the whole story. Citing as main influences Phlebotomized, Demilich, Kayo Dot, and Van Der Graaf Generator, it’s also worth including King Crimson, Mr. Bungle, and Kayo-Dot’s earlier incarnation, Maudlin of the Well, as musical reference points. Yearning: Promethean Fates Sealed doesn’t just demonstrate musical prowess (of which there is plenty), but also a delight at jamming together elements that wouldn’t obviously fit like gypsy folk, Robert Fripp-worthy guitar melodies, The Threepenny Opera pianos, and hammering, programmed double bass-heavy drum parts. Like several of the bands mentioned above, Fleshvessel laughs in the face of genre constraints.
Then there’s the instrumentation. With core members Alexander Torres, Troll Hart, Sakda Srikoetkhruen, and Gwyn Hoetzer employing everything from, viola, hand bells, wooden piccolo, and Thai pin (alongside guitars, bass, various keys, programmed drums and vocals), there’s still room for various guest musicians to add glockenspiel, sleigh bells, trumpet (and plenty more).
And the themes? Well the Promethean myth is part of it, but for Fleshvessel this is an allegorical foundation for exploring further themes, like the cyclical nature of war (on opening track ‘Winter Came Early’) class conflict and manipulation (on the epic ‘A Stain’) and personal mental struggle (on ‘The Void Chamber’). Oh, and there’s also a clip taken from the anthropological documentary Jokro: The death of a wild infant chimpanzee from respiratory disease, in which an infant chimpanzee was cared for and carried by its mother for days after it died.
Death, illness, war, disease, doom, existential torment, and sleigh bells: they’re all to be found within this album.
If all this multitude of descriptives makes the head spin, that’s kind of the impact of sitting through the album. Comprising four large musical pieces (the three mentioned above) plus the 17-minute-closer ‘Eyes Yet to Open’, punctuated by three instrumental vignettes (ranging in style from gypsy folk to a sad, drunken piano ghost of Lou Reed’s Berlin) “epic” is in fact a word that could be applied repeatedly through the course of the album’s main pieces. But with avant-garde tendencies and evident delight at experimentation, the album never veers into symphonic metal territory, we’re (thankfully) on weirder terrain than that (the delicate, haunted-house-piano-driven Brechtian interlude of ‘The Void Chamber’ morphing into absurdly fast double bass peddling and riding out on a glorious guitar solo is just one of many magnificently-mad musical highlights).
With the album’s above-mentioned themes and lyrics like “Ghastly vengeance upon us who wield the sword. Floundering to make sense of any word. Our deeds are done, and so must it be. A bloodthirsty end, for all will see” you, the listener are advised to strap in for an apocalyptic, existential nightmare. However, with thrilling musicality, experimentation, and no small amount of extreme metal ferocity (in the vein of Morbid Angel or Immolation at their most incendiary) Yearning: Promethean Fates Sealed lives up to its grand pretensions.
Buy the album here:
https://fleshvesseldm.bandcamp.com/album/yearning-promethean-fates-sealed
8 / 10
TOM OSMAN