Department of Apocalyptic Affairs

"Department of Apocalyptic Affairs" confused extreme metal fans when it came out. Much of the concern revolved around Fleurety's deviation from black metal (and from their classic debut "Min Tid Skal Komme"). The band changed their imagery too; muted woodland pictures were replaced by a toy bunny holding a hand grenade. The latter choice might be amusing but it doesn't convey much meaning to its audience. I presume it was an in-joke among the band members (who posed with semi-automatic rifles in interview photos). It always seemed like an odd choice for a band that was once so aesthetically convincing.

It makes little sense to compare this album to the debut. The two albums are too different. Instead, compare it to the interim Fleurety recordings such as the "Last-Minute Lies" EP and the Fleurety-associated "I Left the Planet" EP. Both were recorded a year or two before this album. The musicians in Fleurety had already demonstrated their aversion to making more black metal. They had pushed avant-garde rock boundaries on the I Left the Planet session (officially released in 2011), and made some intriguing, atmospheric industrial-ish dream pop on “Last-Minute Lies”.

This album combines those two paths, badly. Hatlevik and Nordgaren were still talented, creative musicians who surrounded themselves with great session players (several of whom were in I Left the Planet). Unfortunately, Fleurety sound like they were trying too hard. All the subtlety has gone. The remaining metallic traces on tracks like "Exterminators" and "Face in a Fever" sound forced and incoherent. Elsewhere, old school hip-hop beats compete with industrial guitar riffs and ambient electro-throbs for attention (e.g., "Shotgun Blast", "Facets 2.0", "Fingerprint"). It all sounds wacky rather than atmospheric. Perhaps a bunny holding a hand grenade was the right aesthetic choice after all.

The worst song is the dull post-amphetamine mush of "Barb Wire Smile". This song sounds like something from Massive Attack’s “Protection”, but with none of the moodiness or song-craft. It is a cautionary tale for the whole album, which reminds me of when Björk collaborated with Carcass for an ill-advised remix of "Isobel". It dates from a similar era and reflects a similar (bad) idea. Seek out the brilliant I Left the Planet EP instead. It may only have three songs, but it is a thousand times more inventive than anything on this album.

Yes. Yes, yes, yes yes yes. Fleurety. Min Tid Skal Komme. Legendary, flawless, unique. I know. I agree. Let's not dwell on it. I'm not here to talk about how this album compares to Min Tid Skal Komme, nor am I about to judge it based on the band's past. I'm going to spend a few minutes and words to talk about the album as is, as an independent entity. There's plenty to talk about, after all.

After the sound of early '90s norwegian black metal was established, came a second stratum of bands that took the iconic sound into new territories. A wave, personified by bands like Ulver, In The Woods...., Enslaved, Mysticum, Dødheimsgard, Ved Buens Ende...., Borknagar, Fleurety themselves and arguably Satyricon and Emperor, stretched the edges of the style by pushing in directions as disparate as prog, pagan/folk, industrial, viking, symphonic, "melodic" and other modifiers. To some, particularly back then, this was seen as outrageous at best and a sign of bandwagon-hopping at worst. Most of these bands would eventually either mostly or completely abandon black metal in favour of other kinds of metal, or non-metal in general. Some of the earlier bands also took to new roads, and suffered harsh critique for it, even though Time, as it tends to do, eventually showed which opinions held up and which have become, as they should, an embarrassingly short-sighted product of their time.

Here we see Fleurety as it broke away from black metal, and decided to explore its own brand of avant-garde, hard to pin down flavour, which is not entirely unlike that of a number of other black metal bands which were attempting something new at the time. Dødheimsgard's 666 International, Mayhem's Grand Declaration Of War, In The Woods....'s Omnio, even Satyricon's Rebel Extravaganza and Thorns's self-titled come to mind: An expanded sound palette which includes vaguely industrial sounds, a modernised, some would say "clean" (perhaps pejoratively) production, more ambitious songwriting, a penchant for dissonance and technicality and a noticeable preponderance of clean vocals are perhaps the main shared features of all these albums, give or take a few, and they all are to be found in this daring, forward-looking effort.

As a corollary to this idea, it's little surprise then that the album should feature a handful of well known names from some of the aforementioned bands, which were going through some experiments of their own at roughly the same time. This album, then, is part of a large, purposeful counterargument to what had quickly gone from being a fresh cry of rebellion to a stale and fashionable trend equal to the one it was supposed to rebel against. In case I need to spell it out, I mean, of course, "True Norwegian Black Metal".

Risking contradicting the very first paragraph of this review, I will say that the main difference (and, possibly, the main gripe that those who disown this album might have) between this album and its predecessor lies in the former's sense of otherwordly ambiance, which has been replaced by an urgent, energetic, almost frantic approach: There are no quiet, soft passages, although some brief moments of drowsiness are allowed us. Most of the time is go time, and the music demands that you pay attention to its changes and whims, that you may not get lost in them.

The result is a very compact, almost forceful collection of songs, which waste no time and leave no one intact. The bass is loud and clear, and is a constant flow that holds and raises the music from below. The drums are very centered most of the time, and sound like they were recorded live, which gives it a very immediate, warm sound, in excellent juxtaposition with the ebb and flow of industrial-ish noises that pierce the album through and through, and the ice cold guitar work which cuts with precision and unpredictability, now defying the rhythms, now carrying them, now standing alone at the centre of the stage. It'd be silly of me not to accept that Nordgaren's guitar prowess, stunts and feats are probably the band's main selling point. That's not to take away from everything else, because they would not work as well on their own (it'd be worth trying, though), but he is a unique weaver of riffs, even coming as he does from the same philosophical school of guitar playing that makes albums like Written In Waters, 666 International, The Black Flux, etc such stand-outs, as well as lesser known bands that should've gained more renown, like Taarenes Vaar/Manimalism and I Left The Planet (all, not coincidentially, directly or indirectly related to eachother).

All the elements that made the band legendary from the start are here: A unique sound and atmosphere, weird, unintuitive riffing and song-structure, the use of distorted and clean guitars, raw and clean voices (including female singers), and the use of timbres and influences from outside the immediate extreme metal realm. This is very much Fleurety, even if the mystique and the black metal allure have been stripped off. This is Fleurety, then, naked and bare, without pretense and appearing as an independent thinker instead of a follower of trends (no matter, I would like to remind myself, how flawless their particular go at that trend was).

This very fact, the fact that they dared, like so many of their contemporaries, to both let go of the tr00kvlt hand of their predecessors, and also to distance themselves noticeably from a legendary debut (or couple of albums in some cases), is the only reason I can explain how this album has been so maligned, dismissed or outright ignored for so long. Much like the albums mentioned on the third paragraph, this album was bound to receive an onslaught of bad critique from the purists who saw it as an affront to the scene, and from the confused crowd who took it as an incoherent mess because they simply weren't acclimated to this level of out-there-ness. I like to thing that the former have been humbled by time and the latter wisened by experience, and that it can now, four score and a year later, be looked upon with the same redeeming eyes that eventually rose all those albums that strayed from the path all those years ago to the status classics. There is absolutely no reason for Department Of Apocalyptic Affairs not to occupy the same pantheon of adventurous, fresh, exciting extreme metal albums from the turn of the millenium. Not even the shadow of its gigantic predecessor can take that away from it.

Department of Apocalyptic Affairs is a massive departure from the sounds that Fleurety is best known for on the much more black metal tinged Min Tid Skal Komme. Here is where they make the jump from progressive black metal into full-on avant-garde metal. If you were expecting any familiar sounds from these guys, you'd be expecting the wrong stuff, because this sounds absolutely nothing like the old Fleurety. The sound on here is more electronic and experimental than before. It's also a lot less consistent and suffers from a severe lack of focus or interest. For all the weird things they do on this album, it never really seems all that energetic or bonkers. There's only scant interest to be had in this album. It turns out that this wasn't the right direction for Fleurety to go in.

Musically, this is more diverse, yet somehow less interesting than their previous work. I suppose it all boils down to how you arrange those diverse sounds and that's what separates a fun, quirky album from one that's pretty dull and just experimenting without much of a clue. Another thing that makes this a much weaker album, is the fact that the guitars are limp and often kept in the background. They have little strength and don't do much to give the album a lot of gusto. The only song I can say was done well in the new avant-garde electro metal style is the first track, "Exterminators" where the guitars actually have some strength and a good riff with a powerful vocal performance from a female guest singer. It sounds lovely, active, and triumphant. The weird random bits mostly bookend the song's beginning and end and actually flow well despite sounding odd. The other songs do nothing as well as that one. Many of the other songs are just the same dull guitars I mentioned earlier. There's also a noticeable lack of dynamics in the songwriting despite the little weird tidbits of various sounds popping up here and there.

Despite how weird this album tries to be, it never really goes all in. There aren't any wacky rhythms or a lot of sudden changes. A lot of these songs run at the same tempo with the same robotic sound about them and this isn't the kind of engaging robotic sound you'd find on any decent industrial metal album. When I say it sounds cold and barely alive, I mean just that. The drums are often plodding and sound fake due to use of what sounds like a cheap drum machine. Some other things that make me confused include Maniac (yes, Maniac from Mayhem) spitting out a verse in an almost rapped style on "Shotgun Blast", and the weird way they split up "Facets 2.0" by having a woman singing out of sync with the boring guitars during the first two thirds and then having Svein Hatlevik yell through a static filter and jumpscare everybody just before the fourth minute of the song. All this bizarre stuff, but with no real heat, atmosphere, melody, or dynamics on most of this album make me very bored and very confused. The random bits of electronica and saxophones also act mostly as stuffing for this very bland turkey of an album. It just seems like these guys just wrote one good song, the opener, and then just threw a bunch of random sounds and guest performers at some very bland semi-industrial black metal and called it a day.

In all honesty, I can't believe that Fleurety made something this diverse and strange, yet also very toothless, stiff, and boring. I didn't even know avant-garde metal could get this stiff and boring. There's a lot of things that do go on, but never in a fun or crazy way. This album also probably doesn't sit well with the people who liked Min Tid Skal Komme since this is such a vast departure and such a sharp drop in quality. If you came for black metal, you will only get scraps of that. Department of Apocalyptic Affairs feels like an album that lacks much of anything. Direction, energy, strength, cohesion, and idea of what to do, those things are all lacking on this album. It's also extremely inconsistent due to the excess of guest performers and clashing styles. This was not a good experience, and a step in the wrong direction from Fleurety.

Fleurety’s “Department of Apocalyptic Affairs” is unusual. Despite how unbelievably incoherent it is, nearly every turn in the music manages to be irritating. For the sake of context, this Norwegian duo is perhaps best known for either their first full length and highly regarded black metal album “Min Tid Skal Komme” or from the fact that Alexander Nordgaren stopped singing after damaging his voice due to impossibly high pitched whistle-register vocals on the band’s earlier releases. Here, Fleurety diverged from their past and took a hard left into experimental territory while simultaneously plummeting in quality. Experimentation can be refreshing, no one likes stale music that merely reiterates what has been done in the past. “Department of Apocalyptic Affairs,” however, shows how novelty alone is painfully insufficient to create an album. Indeed, novelty is the only real driving force here, and little attention was given to more important considerations like vision, structure, or melody. Curve after random curve yields new musical ideas, directions, and disappointments. This failure is haphazard and thoughtless eclecticism.

Opening up with “Exterminators” is helpful for understanding the problems. Within the first two minutes you can get a strong sense of most of the album’s major deficiencies. We are introduced with a silly circus melody joined with wacky flanger guitar and a walking bass that ambles its way into a third unrelated direction. This third direction later turns out to be a genre change. Jazzy, intimate, and silly female scatting vocals abruptly make the bass more comprehensible, but without remedying the impression that we have started a new song. Naturally, some dissonant guitar chords then chime in, only to be interrupted by a nonsense piano diddle. This is in turn followed by a boring guitar riff that comes across as something between an echo and interminable repetition. The entire album often keeps going on like these first two minutes do, failing to sustain any kind of atmosphere or even establish a mood other than disorganization and silliness. Even the component parts that make up the songs are grating because of how they fail to mesh together. Sure, it isn’t completely awful. The bass lines are often interesting and more vivacious than what is normally expected in metal. Still, everything feels entirely out of place and even individual components that may have some merit become grating when carelessly thrown together.

The primary style and source of novelty is the amalgamation of loungey elevator jazz and black metal somewhat in the vein of experimental releases from the same era such as Mayhem’s “Grand Declaration of War” and Dødheimsgard’s “666 International.” When listening to it though, one would think there were also half a dozen other genres involved at all times because of how indelicately these two major themes are blended. Abrupt and pointless changes in music sections sound like the band made two separate albums in different genres, cut them into chunks, and then shuffled together like a deck of cards. The Mayhem comparison provides a nice contrast even for those unfamiliar with “Grand Declaration of War.” “Shotgun Blast” features Maniac on vocals and presenting the lyrics in a harangue-the-listener style as he also used on that album, but as the rest of the music meanders around with dance pad sounds it just feels like random nonsense. Next consider how Dødheimsgard’s more industrial approach also used similar dance percussion elements with driving bass lines to create an interesting mood, which we never hear with this despite the similar parts. Fleurety fails to match their contemporaries in quality because their quest for a more experimental and eclectic approach sacrificed too much of their central metal roots. This does not mean that the album is flawed because it sounds too much like dance music or jazz. Instead, the problem rests with how it tries to be a metal album without the metal, and this leaves the band with no organizing principle or direction. A particularly glaring example of this lack of direction is how with only 8 tracks the duo felt it necessary to include two very similar versions of the song “Face In A Fever” with each member having their own edition. Fleurety’s unwillingness to even settle on one version of the song means you end up listening to it twice, and this is just another instance how the failure to synthesize ideas leads to ruin.

When an album simply fails to come together, it is unfortunate and can result in a failure. This goes much further, its exhausting and obnoxious. More prominent than the obnoxious elements I mentioned earlier are the vacuous vocal decisions that rapidly drop the quality from incoherent to awful. After singling out Maniac’s beatnik poetry reading on “Shotgun Blast” it is hard to pick from the numerous examples what might be next most irritating item on the list, but the cartoon super-villain vocals at the end of “Facets 2.0” are nearly as awful. Again, the surprising part of this is how with so many vocals styles why none of them manage to be anything but aggravating. Even the relatively inoffensive female vocals on “Facets 2.0” sound strained, thin, and wholly inferior to the band’s “Last-Minute Lies” EP version of the same song. The album’s incoherence also makes it naturally exhausting but this is compounded by bad pacing decisions such as having the sixth and seventh tracks so mild and one dimensional (yet still incoherent) that they create the sensation that the album is coming to a close. Not so. Instead, after about 14 minutes of creating that feeling, the album actually ends with a song whose gauche saxophone intrusions had worn out their welcome when the song was the second track.

“Department of Apocalyptic Affairs” does some new and unusual things for a metal album but fails to ever be interesting or organize these various ideas together. Combine this with how irritating so much of the album is and you get something that is far worse than a run-of-the-mill failure.

Originally written for: http://theoakconclave.blogspot.com

I would never have expected such a drastic change if I had not read about it prior to hearing ‘Department of Apocalyptic Affairs’, the enigmatic sophomore from Norwegian legends Fleurety. I’m glad that I had done my research before hearing this unusual follow-up to one of black metal’s most divine moments of the 1990’s in ‘Min Tid Skal Komme’, a record that pioneered the post-black sound that has become so accessible to modern listeners in today’s world. Fleurety’s debut had passed me by and existed unbeknownst to me for several years. I only discovered it somewhat recently and when I decided to give it a listen, knowing that there was a chance that Fleurety would turn out to be a complete disaster on their more experimental sophomore, I was blown away. To say it was ahead of its time would be an understatement. It still serves a purpose today in exposing fans to new aspects of a genre that some would describe as being stagnant. ‘Min Tid Skal Komme’ is an overlooked masterpiece in Scandinavia’s long history with black metal music. That history is neglected in favour of a new found sound on this sophomore, which fails to deliver on the same levels, though some aspects are definitely worth hearing.

However, the same cannot be said of the sophomore in regards to focusing on the black metal roots, as this is a vastly different expression with more emphasis on being experimental, despite the fact that the debut was experimental in its own right. The description of “avant-gardé” doesn’t seem to do this record justice. It is eclectic and eccentric. I would never have expected such a drastic change in instrumentation and fortunes for a band who appeared to have a bright future ahead of them during the mid 1990’s when they first established themselves as a hit. Are Fleurety just another flash in the pan? It would seem so. To say this sophomore disappointed would be grossly misleading. It devastated me and shook me to my core. I could not have expected such a travesty if I had several centuries to prepare for the heart break. What I wanted from Fleurety was a continuation of the themes explored on the debut, but that is not what I was issued with. Instead, this varied portrayal of the avant-gardé genre is a severe let-down, despite several appealing aspects to its faltering game such as the wonderful female vocals of the sultry Heidi Gjermundsen and Karianne Horn, amongst others on songs like ‘Exterminators’ and ‘Facets 2.0’, both vastly different songs.

To me, despite being used to eclectic bands with extravagant music, a lot of the material is unapproachable due to the way in which it is layered. For example, the guitars are filtered out on songs like ‘Facet 2.0’ and make way for the drums and jazzier aspects of the soundscapes, which includes the use electronic input and a saxophone, which does work well with the jazzy bass section. The male vocals on songs like this are largely inaccessible, too. They undo the calming influence of the jazz based material and inflict a laughable source of aggression onto the listener who is by-and-large confused by the theatrical music. There is an element within songs like ‘Facet 2.0’ which reminds me of circus music, which makes it hard to take the direction of the record seriously. Considering this isn’t a plot used throughout the record, the direction is another problematic issue we face when standing up to this unique piece. It leans towards metal, then jazz and even on to a more industrial sound through the use of a central bass sound and programming. I find it difficult to understand what exactly the musicians were aiming for and with the use of so many guest musicians, these problems do not ease with time.

The direction flitters between metal and non-metal and although I don’t have a problem with non-metal material, I would like a sense of conviction in the style that Fleurety no longer have with this sound which has abandoned all sense of black metal for simply being weird. There is no doubting the talents of the musicians, or even the guest musicians, which features a number of Arcturus members, including Garm on vocals, which probably makes that circus feel more vibrant and come alive. Most areas have been adapted to suit this new sound, but I don’t feel the same sort of positivity rush through my body as it did with the adrenaline pumping debut. The production is clear, which works well with the layered features shown throughout the record. The beginning and end tend to be stronger than the middle of the record, which features several mediocre songs intent on dazzling with experimentation, rather than focusing on one general theme to explore in detail. I love the female vocalists used on this record, particularly on soothing songs like ‘Barb Wire Smile’ as they suit the jazzy underbelly - perhaps the biggest highlight of an otherwise unsatisfying follow-up. Unfortunate.