(January releases sometimes get overlooked. DGR doesn’t want that to happen in the case of the new album from Indiana’s Fleshbore, which Transcending Obscurity Records brought us in the first month of this year, and he explains why at length below.)
February brought us a new release in the tech-death world from Indiana’s Fleshbore. Painted Paradise is only the group’s second album but already has them on a strong trajectory. The issue for the band right now is that they’re competing in an incredibly crowded and flush sphere of the musical world and at such a time in which even a genre like tech-death, long known as being the swirling mass of instrumental craziness, has long since codified into something fairly recognizable.
We have labels that even specialize in this sort of thing and, depending on which one a band is on, you could even guess with about eighty percent accuracy as to what they sound like based on that idea alone. Painted Paradise, then, is an interesting release because it is an album where you can understand almost immediately why someone would want to throw their weight behind it.
One of the biggest challenges for a modern day tech-death group is differentiating themselves within the wider genre-sphere and escaping the wall-of-notes stereotype or the rapidly shifting guitar dynamic that often has parts quickly devolving into auditory mud. Yet somehow – even with a healthy dose of influence worship – Fleshbore do so on Painted Paradise, but the bigger question of how may take a little more explanation than what an opening segment may allow.
Everything about Fleshbore‘s Painted Paradise is unrelentingly precise. This is an album that on just a musicianship-quality standard would rank high for being technically impressive. Where Painted Paradise wins over though, is that on top of that the craftsmanship in regard to the songwriting is equally high.
This isn’t just a wall of notes and bent-until-broken scale running with a marathon drummer, there’s solid groove punctuating many of the songs on Painted Paradise such that you could find yourself humming along to many of the guitar rhythms which seem to bounce their way behind everything. The rhythm section is just as punctual, resulting in a sort of blend that earns its technical death metal stripes early on but could just as easily serve as a wider gateway and tutorial to the genre as a whole.
Fleshbore aren’t re-inventing the wheel over the course of Painted Paradise but they are showing that they know how to create a pretty goddamned good version of one. You may be able to dissect and disseminate many of Fleshbore‘s influences or whose crown they may be going after on a particular song, yet despite having the ability to do so, it often feels as if you’d be better off letting it go unused. Where Fleshbore truly differentiate themselves from the wider crowd isn’t so much that they’re the stunning revelation of things to come for the genre as whole, but that they’re an excellent vanguard on Painted Paradise for how to be exacting when executing on a particular formula, so that they already sound as if they’re titans in their genre-sphere without having to go through a multi-albums-long process of forging themselves to get there.
When it comes to the aforementioned titanically crowded tech-death genre, the discussion swirls around not what sort of music a band play – the genre long having codified into a recognizable form from moment one, we’ve now achieved sensory status that you instinctively “know” – but rather what sort of musical vein the group tap into and if they justify doing so. Painted Paradise does so from the beginning, announcing itself by the classic maneuver of already being in fifth gear by the time the listener manages to catch up.
“Setting Sun” sets the tone for much of Painted Paradise as a whole, laying out early that the music for tonight’s dining experience is going to be ruthlessly fast and unerring in every aspect. We as a species have created machinery that can hammer out objects to the most minute specifications and so have Fleshbore on the musical front. The eight songs here all hover between the four and five and a half minute mark – two of them are a hair under at about 3:57 but who’s counting? – and it is a blueprint that Fleshbore rarely stray from.
The various elements on this album are laid bare immediately yet somehow Painted Paradise still manages to keep things interesting. It would be easy to find yourself lost in this ever-increasing musical rotation but that is a credit to Fleshbore and their taste for both groove and velocity; there’s plenty within any particular song to lock onto – even when you can pick apart the many musical influences that Fleshbore gleefully pillage to make their own. They tag in and out for vocal purposes in many of the songs, identifying Fleshbore as new entrants into the vocal competitions, and one of the veins they manage to tap into early on has them fusing the mechanically precise riffing of a group like Soreption with the tempo-shattering changes that Archspire and Exocrine have long been feasting upon. As “Setting Sun” ends and it seems as if the song is melding into “The World”, those points become that much clearer.
Fleshbore deserve commendation on one front in particular and that is to not give in to the idea that wall-to-wall technicality must devolve into a blur. They’re running marathons at a sprinter’s pace for much of Painted Paradise for sure, but every instrument manages to score equal time and equal spotlight over the album. What would be the use of turning your musical exercises into artform if you were to then bury one of them in a pile left behind by another instrument? You can run down the musical punch card for Painted Paradise and find that Fleshbore have already shot holes through it within three songs. The rest of the time can then be invested in watching them as they leap through the various musical acrobatics and pyrotechnics.
Fleshbore don’t even have to work too hard to spell that out either. Once they’ve wrapped up a well-written and melodic guitar solo in “The World” and its final moments of insanity, “Target Fixation” and its opening segments feel like a quickly smashed together data-dump of “alright, what have we not swung for the fences at yet?” and then doing so in its beginning moments. Hearing the classic ear-bending and finger-warping guitar of the old Brain Drill days suddenly being resurrected is musical necromancy that certainly wasn’t expected to come screaming in from just out of frame like a truck in a Final Destination movie, but it’s no less welcome. Fleshbore take a lot of constituent parts and slam them together into a musical stew that is all their own. You know every element that may go into a classic beef stew but by the time its all prepared there are still marks of delineation to go through on just how delicious it might be, and in this case you also have to acknowledge that there’s somehow a leg sticking out of it.
The order of the day leaps rapidly between musical contortionism and expert delivery to create an otherwise recognizable alien creature. Painted Paradise is nailing all of the genre-hallmarks consistently throughout its thirty-six minutes. Many of its songs are purpose-built, with the shortest songs “Target Fixation” and “The Ancient Knowledge” being the most rapid-fire of the bunch and longer ones like “Inadequate” and “The World” hinting at expansive and wider ambitions, only for the latter to become an act of stacking heavier and heavier objects on top of one another until it becomes an inverted pyramid of music. Taking advantage of the time allowed within a song doesn’t always mean a bigger song within the Fleshbore camp but instead an opportunity to jam more and more “song” into the confines of it.
Painted Paradise should have been long snapped up by the enjoyers of the tech-death sphere, but if this is one of those releases that managed to sail by in the massive musical release-flooding that happens in the beginning of the year, now is a good chance to go back and give it a listen. It is undeniable how well-crafted the songs emerging from the Fleshbore camp are on this album. Every part and influence recognizable, but molded into new form and constructed into something enjoyable all the same. That laser-guided precision and “skateboarding big ramp”-esque athletics that help define Fleshbore‘s latest offering is also what helps it stick around in the mental space long after this one has wrapped up.
No song is reduced to just one lowly gimmick to maintain interest here. A few of them in fact lay in that difficult to define world of making things work together without having to strain too hard to bend a new part so hard that it almost breaks. Painted Paradise is just as much a testament to having pieces fit perfectly into place as it is “on fire acrobatics”. Songs are carefully crafted into musical adventures with enough melodic ear that they don’t devolve into tech-death mud.
Fleshbore deftly bounce their way across multiple sub-genre lines without fully sinking into the quicksand of any particular one. Thus, they present us something sleek and altogether recognizable – a musical sports car that can be broken down into its constituent elements easily enough, but packaged together it still excites something within us, whether it be the curves, paintjob, or the sheer thrill of watching that thing go zero-to-one-hundred in a nanosecond. Painted Paradise achieves ludicrous chaos early on and looks good doing so the whole way.
https://fleshboreband.bandcamp.com/album/painted-paradise
https://www.facebook.com/fleshbore