2021’s first full-length from Indiana’s Fleshbore, Embers Gathering, offered up a combination of technicality balanced by melody and grit. In comparison to the increasingly sterile sound of bands going too hard on the musicianship and less on the ‘deathly’ side, their sound was a welcome one. Painted Paradise is their follow-up, this time released through Transcending Obscurity Records, and it picks up where the debut left off. Those seeking a nice mixture of brutality and technical musicianship should be thrilled with this one.
Above all else, Painted Paradise is frantic. There’s an exhilarating rush you can grab when listening to the music that only death metal is meant to give, and instead of having the technicality get in the way, it enhances the experience. As mentioned before, some bands tend to overemphasize the tech aspect, which leaves the aggression factor lacking. As you can hear in “Laplace’s Game,” the riffing and brutality is upfront and center. The vocals are brutal and varied, and the speed runs thrive off of energy. Grooves offer some weight to them, while the drums batter away with intensity. It’s heavy. But also in the same track, there’s a melodic interlude that provides an atmospheric breather for a second. There’s a great use of balance between melody and steamrolling brutality that helps the tracks to feel less like different iterations of the same concept. “Target Fixation” opens with some Archspire-esque vocal acrobatics, but then the rest of the music accelerates to the same speed. Grooves eventually fall into line, as do some strong melodies within that same space, giving the music some extra gravitas.
If you enjoy your technical death metal with plenty of aggressive meat on its bones, Fleshbore should be on your get to know list. Painted Paradise can bring out just as much flash and flair as the next tech death act, but it still has the barbaric fury present to provide a pure adrenaline rush. Toss in just enough melodies and groove to keep it memorable, and it’s a formula that is bound to impress fans of the genre.