Fleshgod Apocalypse and the Realization of Artistic Vision

Collin R. Vogt
Jul 12, 2017
11 min read

Of course they wear corpse paint. Image via fanart.tv

What makes an album feel necessary? We’ve all felt it, that sense of importance that some albums are able to convey. As if they are an essential addition to our cultural and musical landscape. I talk a lot about “perfect” albums and music that feels inspired rather than unoriginal or forced, as if it’s already bored by itself before you even hear it (everything Metallica’s released since the black album, for instance).

But what I mean by a so-called “perfect” album is not that the music on it is without some flaws or that I enjoy every second of it equally. Music is to subjective and personal to be labelled as flawless. What you might find as a flaw, I might enjoy. What I really mean when I refer to an album as “perfect” is that it is perfect for that artist. It is a pure distillation of their creative essence and every tool available to the group is utilized to the best of their ability.

Rust in Peace, by Megadeth, is just as perfect of an album as Master of Puppets by Metallica. These two albums often get compared, which is fine, as some people will enjoy one more than another. But the fact of the matter is the both these records perfectly describe the unique identities of these two bands, and one cannot be definitively stated as being better than the other.

A few other perfect albums, in the way I’ve described the term here, are Pure Heroine, by Lorde, The ArchAndroid by Janelle Monae, and the album I want to talk about today, King, by Fleshgod Apocalypse.

Janelle, if you're reading this, will you marry me?

Obviously, these three albums could not be more different from one another. A teenage angst, glam-poor-ous melancholic celebration; a neo-jazz, funkified trip down the rabbit hole via the mind of a bona-fide weirdo; and, with Fleshgod, an explosive, furious, symphonic concept album written by guys who are as likely to listen to Don Giovanni as they are to listen to Reign in Blood.

King is the best album that Fleshgod Apocalypse can make. Their composition, as ever, is bold and unique. They definitely know how to make an song that gets up and goes, that’s for sure. But on this album, they balance out the action by slowing down a bit in a few places. While these songs are enjoyable in their own right, they also serve to differentiate the music. Nobody likes an album that moves in a straight line from point A to point B. You want it to move up and down. This makes each song stand out. On previous albums from Fleshgod, you could very easily mistake one song for any other on the album. You won’t make that mistake on King. In addition to this, there are two big improvements made on King from their previous albums that contribute to the greater artistic success of this album.

One thing Fleshgod is known for is making heavy use of symphonic instruments and operatic vocals, and in my opinion, these elements are blended in much more subtly than on Agony or Labyrinth where the instruments always seemed to struggling to dominate each other. While I did enjoy those albums, this always took me out of the experience. The guitars always sounded weaker than the symphonic elements, which is not exactly what I want when listening to a death metal album. The guitars should be dominant in the mix, as they have the most forward momentum of any of the instruments.

"The Violation", from Fleshgod Apocalypse's album Agony.

On King these instruments are more well-balanced, as if the songs were written with both the electronic and the acoustic instruments in mind, instead of writing the music on guitars and then putting the symphonic instruments on top of them, which would create a poorly balanced album. The symphonic instruments are always present, but they flit in and out of foreground, coming in to add a bit of pomp and circumstance, but receding when necessary to allow the guitars to move the song forward. They are more properly utilized to add tension and drama in a genre that occasionally struggles with these concepts, and they add a distinctly “Fleshgod” flavor to their musical smoothie.

The second improvement is related to the previous one, and it’s that the actual audio mixing on the album has been vastly improved. On Agony, the guitars were very scratchy and not well-defined, and when combined with the overpowering symphonic instruments, they ended up being very muddy. Then, on the following album, Labyrinth, the mixing was even worse. All the tracks felt mashed together into one indistinguishable blob of brutality. Again, I did really enjoy both these albums, but there is a clear downgrade from Agony to Labyrinth.

On King, each instrument sounds far more distinct. The guitars are clear and crisp, with just enough gain to have aggression, but not so much that it sounds like an indistinct, floppy rubber band. It’s very round and wet, as opposed to the more flat and crackly tone on the previous albums. This is probably a result of adding more mids into the guitar mix. The drums are sharp, snappy, and full, but the mixing of the drums has actually always been pretty consistently good on each of Fleshgod’s albums.

The biggest improvement, in my opinion, is in the bass. I personally feel that a bass should pretty much always sound the same. It has a very important place in the composition, which is to add depth without sacrificing clarity. The guitars and bass should have no difficulty being heard together because their sound waves travel such that the human ear doesn’t have much trouble distinguishing between them. As a result, the bass tone should always be crystal clear, thick, chocolate-y, and with a fat ass on the end of it that booms. If you can't tell the bass from the guitar, you've done something wrong. The bass is the dish upon which your entrée is served. If you serve it on a cracked, shitty, dirty plate, the food isn’t going to make as good of an impression as it could because it's being blurred out by a dirty dish. The bass needs to be pristine and clear, and on King, it is, which is what I suspect may have been what caused the stringed instruments on Labyrinth and Agony to be somewhat indistinguishable - too much gain on the bass, which caused it to blend in too much with the guitars.

All these improvements lead to a great tonal balance. The instruments all manage to stay out of each other’s way and never cover up another performance. They are each distinguishable from each other and thus are all able to make the best contribution possible to the overall experience, as each are allowed the space to play to their strengths. The guitars are the words of a sentence, the drums are the punctuation, and the bass is the voice it’s being read in. You see, I’m sure, how each of these aspects can make or break the overall experience. Neither is more important than the others.

As I said, these improvements enhance the clarity of the music and allows the vision of the band to be presented more successfully and purely. This elevates the material by sounding more cohesive and deliberate. You have to have good foundations to build a good house. Which is where the writing comes in, because it’s still possible to have good foundations and an ugly house.

As for the music, King is as technically advanced as anything they have previously released. Fleshgod has never failed to impress in the chops department. Many of the songs blaze along at their signature breakneck speed. One thing that I noticed when listening to this album was that the songs were much more textured. They make better use of having two guitars on this album, as there are frequent sections of harmonization and backing chords or overlain melodies. It’s not always a bad thing to have both guitars playing the same thing – this can add thickness and power – but it is a mistake to only use them this way. By using the two guitars to support each other it makes the music more nuanced and aurally intriguing.

This is perhaps a microcosm of the fact that King is a much more varied album than any of Fleshgod’s previous efforts. The album is essentially broken up, unofficially, in two halves. It begins with “Marche Royale”, a symphonic overture of sorts that flows into what is basically a three-part suite, being “In Aeternum”, “Healing Through War”, and the album’s standout track “The Fool”. These three songs are classic Fleshgod fare, although with the various improvements to the sound and structure that have already been mentioned.

“The Fool”, however, is where you really begin to notice the compounding effects of all these improvements. The song begins with a little baroque lick played on a harpsicord, and then immediately explodes into its bombastic and layered hook, which has strong chords mirroring the baroque styling of the intro and paired with Fleshgod’s signature speed-picking, before slowing down and unleashing a blaring trumpet blast, seemingly as much to signal the true start of the song as well as the high point of the album. They then move into something which was a bit atypical for the band, which is a slower, more deliberate “chugging” riff, which is a nice counterpoint to the speed-picking I mentioned at the beginning of the song. The best part of the song, however, is the hook and the chorus, both of which combine all the positive elements and improvements I’ve described on the album.

"The Fool", from Fleshgod Apocalypse's album King.

You should think of the chorus of the song as the thesis statement. You relate it to the listener multiple times to remind them of the theme, but it should never be the bulk of the song itself. In fact, oftentimes it’s shortness is what makes it so good – you should use it enough so that it’s familiar to the listener but not so often that it becomes predictable or unsatisfying. In the chorus for “The Fool”, the strong chords of the opening hook return, but in a different progression, hinting at the same idea without merely copying and pasting it. The chords punctuate the underlying fast picking, actually serving to enhance the pace because it feels as if it’s building to a head. In the chorus, the symphonic instruments are also more pronounced in the mix, as they should be, as the chorus is certainly the flashiest, biggest section.

But, importantly, they don’t undermine the modern instruments, or the operatic vocals being employed to contrast the regular growls and screams, which are absent from the first chorus and then brought back to accent the singing in the second iteration of the chorus, which is a brilliant technique used to show a progression and building intensity of the song. This is the moment of greatest tension, the climax of the song, and it’s perfectly executed. This is the difference from some of their previous works. By having this variation, and the rises and falls of traditional dramatic structure, the tension and intensity of the song are enhanced, without sacrificing speed or technicality or whatever else.

Then King does something unexpected: it slows down for “Cold as Perfection”, which is a very different style of song for Fleshgod Apocalypse, being more in the form of a ballad (as much as a death metal song can be a ballad, anyway), which is shown through the slower tempo, the distinct and repeated sections that are progressively built upon, the use of a chorus vocal section, and a dramatic shift about two thirds of the way through the song into a section distinct enough that it could probably be a totally different song. It’s good writing and the song adds a lot of variety and contrast to what you would expect from a Fleshgod Apocalypse album while still feeling like it’s completely within their wheelhouse. It’s a nice development and very encouraging to see that the band is capable of utilizing many different styles.

Another fast song, “Mitra”, follows, and then comes the midpoint in the album, “Paramour”, which is a short, operatic-vocals piece. The music itself is neither here nor there, it doesn’t return to or foreshadow any themes from the rest of the album, outside of the lyrical content itself. The most important thing about this song is that it really serves as a break in the action, catching the listener off-guard and refocusing their attention on the second half of the album.

The second half is thematically quite similar to the first. It opens with a blazer, “And the Vulture Beholds”, which is right up there with “The Fool” as stand-outs for the album. It has all the same variety and intensity as “The Fool”, but doesn’t quite capture the band’s creative essence as thoroughly as that song. It’s a great song but, if I could tell someone to listen to one song from Fleshgod to understand what they were all about, it would have to be “The Fool”.

“Gravity” is also a very fast-paced song, but it doesn’t have the same melodiousness that “The Fool” & “And the Vulture Beholds” have, and thus didn’t grab me quite as much. Following "Gravity" is “A Million Deaths”, which is another high-point of the album which succeeds in characterizing all the best aspects of Fleshgod Apocalypse. It’s dramatic, intense, indisputably impressive, and is well thought out from beginning to end, building to a climax and then masterfully releasing the energy at the point of greatest tension. It is also an excellent showcase of Fleshgod’s identity.

"Cold as Perfection", from Fleshgod Apocalypse's album King.

The album effectively closes with “Syphilis”, which, like “Cold as Perfection”, is a variation from typical Fleshgod formula. It’s quite dark and brooding, using big, bold, and slow symphonics to build grandeur and a sense of forcefulness which is on greater display here than elsewhere on the album. It comes off as a “march into oblivion”, a resignation to one’s own fate, a defiant and resolute spit in the face of death as one proudly accepts his own demise. That’s the best way I can describe the song. It’s slow, steady, and theatrical. It reminds me of a few of Behemoth’s songs, notably, their album closers, or tracks that are at least very near to the end, such as “Lucifer” from Evangelion, “Inner Sanctum” from The Apostasy, and “The Reign ov Shemsu-Hor”, from Demigod. These songs are slow, brooding tracks themselves, which is as much a deviation from Behemoth’s typical structure as “Syphilis” is for Fleshgod.

I think that for both of these bands, the positioning of these slow tracks towards the end of the album is meant to reflect a pensiveness and a more clear reflection of the base inspirations for the work as a whole, while also reaching the pinnacle of nihilism – somehow speed seems so much more hopeful than the doom and gloom of a slow track.

The final - and title - track, “King”, is more of a coda on the album. It’s a solo piano track, and while certainly beautiful, it’s main function, as with both “Marche Royale” and “Paramour”, is to serve as a framing device for the rest of the music, lending more weight to the real “meat” of the album by offering a respite from the intensity and differentiation. The album closes similarly to how it began, which I feel further indicates the amount of thought and planning that went into the album. Fleshgod Apocalpyse is a band that doesn't just care about the technicality and intensity of their music - they really respect the traditional structure of the timeless symphonies and concertos they were clearly inspired by, which often loop back, thematically, to the beginning. It's a brilliant realization of the bands potential and creative vision.

Again, a perfect album does not mean that it is for everyone – in fact, the truth may be quite the opposite. A perfect album for any band might be the most uninviting, as it is the most pure and honest translation of the artists vision. And I don’t want it to sound as if I’m not a fan of their previous work – I thoroughly enjoy it, and yet I was still blown away by King. It is indisputably Fleshgod Apocalypse’s masterpiece. Hopefully, they continue to build off the artistic success of this album and continue to spread their wings as a band that truly has no equal.