This is the second album from US solo post-black metal band Flowers of Rust.
Crude Exhibitions of the Soul contains 33 minutes of post-black metal that’s of an uncommon variety. Flowers of Rust is an act with a different voice, and it uses it to command and demoralise.
The Flowers of Rust style is one that takes black metal’s cold foundation, delicately drags it into warmer post-blackened waters, and then injects it with just enough caustic sludge to make it dangerous. The end result is music that’s imbued with a vicious beauty. It’s blackgaze, but murderous.
Crude Exhibitions of the Soul has the feel of a creation that could fall apart at any moment, but is no less deadly because of it. The artist holds everything together for the album’s duration, honing his art into a killing blade that’s brittle, but has a wicked edge. It’s like sonic ice – its strength is transitory, but its bite is lethal. The music’s fragile melodies are as sharp as razors, and its riffs are made of glass that cut deep. The serrated vocals seep with venom and drip with contempt. They lash out with lacerating force as the music swirls around them.
There are quite a few highlights, and each song has something to recommend itself, (minus the pointless intro and outro). I particularly like Brave New Corpse and subsequent track Bright Violence. The former is a song that embodies the record well, and ends with a climax that fuses emotive atmosphere and piercing despair, while the latter has a militant first half that blends atmosphere and uncaring brutality, with a darker, slower, seething second half. It’s all good stuff though.
If you like your blackgaze raw and violent, yet to still shine with jagged lustre, then Crude Exhibitions of the Soul is for you.
Highly recommended.
Wonderbox Metal 