Min Tid Skal Komme＜限定盤/White Vinyl＞

There's no getting around it: Fleurety was a strange band, and Min Tid Skal Komme, their first full-length, is a strange album. This is clear from the opening minutes of the first track, "Fragmenter av en Fortid." It begins with soft acoustic guitar strumming, down-tempo drumming, and jazzy fretless bass gurgling before slowly easing its way into more distinctly metal territory, with double-bass drumming; distorted, tremolo-picked guitar playing; and finally (after about four minutes), grim, shrieking black metal vocals. The rest of the album contains plenty of other incongruous and unexpected (for a black metal album) moments, such as Portishead-tinged female vocals (scattered throughout several songs); some odd-timed, Rush-flavored riffs; and even a few sections where the band is playing in a major key. This music is not especially aggressive or heavy -- in fact, much of it even feels laid-back -- nor is it especially "evil" sounding. There is almost a feeling that, if black metal hadn't been around and prevalent at the time, these guys would have found some other genre to pervert. As this album shows, they certainly weren't interested in conforming to that genre's norms, which, even by this stage (the album was recorded in 1995), were firmly in place, with many imitative and similar-sounding bands popping up throughout Scandinavia. In terms of overall mood and approach, Min Tid Skal Komme is somewhat comparable to a couple of other albums from the period: Ulver's Bergtatt and Ved Buens Ende's Written in Waters. It's not quite on the level of those two albums, but it is still interesting due to its mysteriousness and its subtle, but very real, strangeness. ~ William York