ALBUM REVIEW: Manifestaties Van De Ontworteling – Fluisteraars
Just over a decade and a half into their career, FLUISTERAARS are a well established entity within the world of black metal at this point. Ever since the band’s earliest output first saw the light of day, their incredibly varied and dramatic sound has set them apart from many of their peers, with two of their albums – 2015’s Luwte and 2020’s Bloem – arguably being some of the most impressive black metal records that the genre’s more atmospheric outer reaches have produced in recent memory. The band’s latest, fifth album, Manifestaties Van De Ontworteling, sees their sound shift drastically away from extremity, instead embracing a more minimalistic dark ambient style, not only throwing their listeners a musical curveball but also further broadening their already eclectic and experimental style into a distinctly different genre, with excellent results.
De Wieg Van Stormen, with its ominous, droning motif, creates a huge, imposing tone, crafting a dense, hypnotic sound right off the bat that couples cinematic minimalism with field recordings to ease the listener into the experimental music that features on this album in an interesting and gargantuan fashion. It’s a song that never fully shifts out of first gear, with only the fuzzier tone altering the sound in any way, but it’s a compelling piece of music that shows that even when their music is stripped down to its barest components, FLUISTERAARS are more than capable of building something monolithic.
Zwaar Van Daling Beladen takes the cavernous ambient sound of the preceding track into lighter territories, swinging away from the domineering, sludgy style that was present there in favour of a shimmering though no less dark approach that ebbs and flows between moments of drawn out melodicism, with the music gradually altering to embrace a sinister undercurrent as it progresses. De Diamant Van De Tussenwereld adopts a ritualistic sound, with the monotonous dirge that serves as the backbone of this particular track possessing a deep, gothic flavour, with the inclusion of clanging chimes, gongs and haunting vocal lines adding some variety that breaks things up whilst also contributing to the sonorous, mantra-like quality at the music’s core. It proves to be livelier than the last two songs, if a hulking slab of ambient music can ever be truly described as lively.
Het Open Vuur Als Altaar takes the expressive, industrial edge of the last track’s closing minutes and develops it further, with polished dulcimers cutting through the murky production and providing an effective, powerful style that utilises traditional musicality well. The sound sits somewhere between Middle Eastern folk and bluegrass, complete with moaning slide guitars to serve as an excellent focal point around which heady, atmospheric synths are shrouded, turning this into one of this record’s best tracks. Spirituele Vervreemding reverts to the kind of bombastic drone that characterises the album’s opener, but does a great job of carrying forward the stringent flourishes that accompany the last three songs, with heavily distorted owl shrieks and church bells creating the eerie, impenetrable sound that De Wieg Van Stormen was trying to achieve. It sounds much closer to the style of a band like SUNN 0))) or even EARTH at their most abrasive, ramping up the industrial touches, with the end result being a biting and visceral take on the prevailing sound that has defined this album.
Der Kunst brings the album full circle, returning to the vast waves of ambience that were central to the earliest offerings, with little, if any, subtle hooks to punctuate the opaque sound, save the wash of some particularly bright and airy moments within the middle of the song. It moves drastically away from the harsher sonic battery of the last two offerings, acting as a reserved pallet cleanser that helps close this record in a huge, hypnotising way.
The difference between the music on Manifestaties Van De Ontworteling and its 2021 predecessor Gegrepen Door De Geest Der Zielsontluiking couldn’t be more stark; where the latter was a fierce and cavernous piece of black metal with an atmospheric edge, this new album shifts not only away from the band’s core sound, but departs from the kind of influences that have been overt in their music throughout their career. But even describing this as a foray into dark ambient is misleading, because there’s enough variety and subtle touches within this album to make this distinct even within this tried and tested formula, creating what is arguably one of the finest albums that style of music has produced in years. As always, FLUISTERAARS have managed to move away from what is expected of them and their music, keeping their listeners guessing as to what they’ll do next whilst pushing their experimental and imaginative sound into new territories, and further cementing their reputation as one of black metal’s most genuinely unpredictable acts.
Rating: 9/10
Manifestaties Van De Ontworteling is out now via Eisenwald.
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