FLESS "Volume 1"

FLESS

“Volume 1”

Bedroom black metal will not die! Misanthropes continue to huddle in their lonely abodes, banging their instruments and howling at the moon in the hopes of capturing their life failure anguish on tape. The original tape version of this was released in a massive dump of 13 copies before Lunar Apparitions somehow latched onto it. Now the horror of FLESS will be shared with a (somewhat) larger audience…

FLESS is actually a guy called One Entity. Why the project isn’t simply called ONE ENTITY will remain as mysterious as Mr. Entity’s real name. On “Volume 1”, he does manage to conjure up a horrid and homely sound that makes early DARKTHRONE sound like THE MOODY BLUES. A soul has to really be dark to be a fan of this ultra-primitive raw mayhem. For one thing, the music here is fuckin’ LOUD...it sounds like O.E. stood right on top of his home recording equipment while channeling this. Fuzzed up and blown out, but it does have a kind of heaviness which other one man BM bands lack. “Chamber of Lust and Flesh”, “Blood Cult Rituals” and “Burned At the Pyre” are raw attacks in the mode of old French BM bands and ultra-cultish maniacs like FURZE and DIABOLI. “Orgy of the Vampyres” is slow, sick and deadly, kind of in the mode of HELLHAMMER’s “Triumph of Death”.

There is a hypnotic power to it, but to call a spade a spade, “Raped Upon The Altar” just sounds like random riff jamming at rehearsal committed to tape, including a cornucopia of fuckups. “Serpent Tomb” is creepy minimal soundscaping and “Moonlight Fornication” ends the album with an oddball combination of black doom, clean but twangy guitar layered over a chick mumbling about self-mutilation and a final blast of utter noise. Forget the vocals...they are beyond distorted.
It will be bilious crap to many, but FLESS does have that strange evil magnetism that many of the most primitive black metal bands possess. One for true ogres and vampyres to seek out and worship…

LUNAR APPARITIONS

FLESS