Fleurety
Min Tid Skal Komme

When it came time to create Norway, God, being more or less at the end of His arduous work, decided to indulge Himself and go overboard with self-satisfaction. He thus distributed the population in a somewhat bizarre way, a unique and original class division.
Each Norwegian is naturally linked to another Norwegian to form a super-Norwegian. Now, this super-Norwegian, who remember is made up of two Norwegians whose identity is realized only through their union, has roughly three possible paths to follow in life.
The super-Norwegian can become a lumberjack. In this way, one cuts the tree while his companion warns him when the tree is about to fall, and their roles are interchangeable.
The second path is to become a fisherman. Here the role division is much more evident: one pushes the boat from the shore while the other rows and fishes, only to return loaded with fish to his companion waiting on the shore.
The third path, the one we are concerned with today, is the distinctly musical one.

Super-Norwegian goes black metal then. For this superman, it is inconceivable to form a band composed of more than two people, or in other words, of a single super-Norwegian. He can barely tolerate the simultaneous presence of another super-Norwegian, and when the threshold of common endurance is exceeded, bad things happen, like with Mayhem. We talk about session musicians when we want to define a Norwegian who, by divine error, was not created with his alter ego and therefore seeks his fulfillment by participating in as many albums as possible of some super-Norwegian, sometimes just in a track, with a spoken part or a sigh to reach the coveted goal of appearing in the credits of the aforementioned album. Thus, we have a plethora of bands made up of only two members, and the reason has been explained above.

Fleurety, like Solefald, and MANY OTHERS are also a duo. They spare us, and we are grateful for it, the torment of the cardboard sound of the drum machine, which God has provided to every super-Norwegian endowed with musical talent to achieve his purpose, and fortunately, although this Min Tid bla bla bla seems more like a very underground product, we can enjoy a clear and very clean production.

Let's get to the music. The avant-garde black metal of Fleurety is, first of all, background sly music (even if it will be difficult to ignore Alexander Nordgaren's unbearable shrieks), it encompasses many jazzy passages complete with fretless bass (uooooouuuww) with equally atmospheric passages where female voices appear à la Portishead, all interspersed with a bit of healthy black metal derivative of the experiences that the two probably had within the Inner Circle (mostly negative due to their uniqueness... treated as if they were black people, to put it simply).
Thus, we are light years away from Arcturus's pompousness, from the irony of Solefald, resulting in being much more direct, with no trace of gaudy Casio keyboards, therefore, although being terribly slow and let's say it calmly, soporific. They could certainly be likened to the more ambient production of Ulver but not that much, just to give you an example.
Like Ulver, Fleurety is certainly not a group to listen to while working or studying or while writing a review, for instance, this one, since I almost dozed off a couple of times with this Min Tid bla bla bla in the background.

The innovative streak of this group, which began from the distant 1993 making avant-garde black metal, is appreciable, thus being one of the seminal groups, although damaged by numerous periods of inactivity due to the labels' inability to promote them properly, probably too jazz/ambient to be black metal and too black metal to be jazz/ambient. Continuously trapped in this limbo, they also released Last Minute Lies in '99 and the recent Department Of Apocalyptic Affairs, with an at least unsettling cover, which includes the crème de la crème of Norwegian avant-garde black metal as guest musicians.

They will certainly not make history for this album, but Min Tid bla bla bla turns out to be a straightforward album without frills that fully reflects the great creativity of this duo who offer a type of music probably unique in the world. Black/jazz/ambient metal? Try asking your trusted retailer, with an understanding smile, they'll pull out your copy of Min Tid bla bla bla, and you'll go home happier.