Based in Joensuu, in the eastern Finnish Lakeland region, Flail has existed in its current line-up of Ivczz (main instrument: bass) and EvM (drums) since 2022 at least. Recent album "Within the Firths of Futility", while the second album released under the Flail project name, is actually the first album Ivczz and EvM have put together as Flail, as previous Flail releases (from 2018 to 2020) featured a different drummer. Flail fans should perhaps be prepared for a different-sounding band on "Within the Firths of Futility", one still operating within the realms of slow and cavernous depressive BM / doom but travelling in a direction stretching the boundaries and potential of that particular BM hybrid sub-genre into equally dark – and even darker – abysses.
Starting with opener "Into Celestial Abyss", the duo launches into a slow groaning if actually busy trawl of steady-paced percussion, hypnotic distorted bass guitar and drowsy background synth and synth-generated choral accompaniment. Heard casually, the track can come across as repetitive and monotonous, though in its details it's more varied than most listeners would appreciate. Changes in melody, riffs and mood tend to be gradual, so gradual that they may not even register with audiences. The lead vocal is so raspy and gravelly that you can believe it's coming from a demonic revenant just an hour or two out of the grave. The more interesting moments in this track come after its six-minute halfway point, with some emphasis on a bleak black ambient background of hellish wind and sinister low-droning roar, a more agonised lead vocal and short breakouts of guitar fuzz mania and synth drone melancholia.
Follow-up track "A Sonorous Vigor" has rather more energy, even a bit of brightness, and it would seem that "Into Celestial Abyss" is intended mainly to set the scene, as it were, for a proper launch into the darkest possible abyss imaginable. The song is very repetitive for the majority of its length and it's clearly a transition from one state of being into another that is the focus of the album's longest and most important track "In Perished Time". Dirge-like and crushing in atmosphere and texture it may be, intentionally dreary and tedious in its pace and construction, "In Perished Time" is most noteworthy for its funereal atmosphere, at once fogged up with synth drone and soporific synth choral moans, overlaid by that horrific death-rattle vocal howl. The interplay of distorted fuzz bass and pained synth drone, along with the lead vocal and the background sighs, and contrasting with steady and sure percussion rhythm and beats, and crisp cymbal work, keep listener attention focused all the way through the track's 15-minute playing time. If you are fully immersed in this song, you will be able to pick up various melodic details as they come and go, almost right up to the end of the track where they rise and fall in the manner of a sleeping giant.
You might expect that after "In Perished Time", there may be no more to be said from the depths of a depressed and depressive Hell, and closer "Ruins of Futility" does have the feel of being a footnote to the long third track – the drama and tension from that track are still present here – but at the same time, there is a new mood, one sad and tormented, as if behind the earlier anger and menace something deep, sorrowful and in pain was actually struggling to make itself known. If you have reached this part of the album after the earlier monotony and oppression – I don't expect that most listeners can last this long - you will definitely go away with a feeling of sadness and pity for the entity at the centre of this particular soundscape abyss, trapped there for all eternity and only able to make its pain known and felt through this raw and bleak music narrative.
It may not make most people's most popular BM release lists for 2024, but this album definitely is worth taking the time to hear out at least once – and twice! – if only to hear how such repetitive music, clearly on the edge of sleep-inducing boredom, can cast its own particular hypnotic spell on listeners and keep them rapt. EvM definitely keeps busy pounding out the beats and rhythms even as the distorted production softens the edges of his hits and the cymbal crashing. The synth-generated choirs do considerable work as well and become an integral part of the noisy textures of the music. All the way through the music, even though much of it is distorted, there is a raw edge that does not go stale no matter how tiresome the endless riffs and drone loops may become. The mix of songwriting and improvisation has hit an ideal balance in this work of bleak atmo-BM / doom sound art.
Sample: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nXZU8fIPwI4&t=337s
