Fleshgod Apocalypse – Opera REVIEW

9th August 2024 0 By Craig

There’s a lot of buzz and excitement going around in the Death Metal community at the moment around Fleshgod Apocalypse and their upcoming album Opera. Rumors going around that the Italian Symphonic Death Metallers have possibly created a whole new sub-genre of Metal, “Opera Metal”.

Is the hype warranted? Does the music live up to expectations? Fuck yes, it does – review over, go and buy the album! No seriously, go and buy it – the entire album is incredible!

What’s that? Do you want more of a review than that? Oh, go on then, given that you have asked nicely.

Opera is an opera written around the mountain climbing accident that happened to their frontman and mastermind Francesco Paoli, in 2021.

Ode to Art (De’ Sepolcri) starts with lovely clean operatic singing and the music is nice and soft. The gentle vocals wrap you in a soft comfort blanket before I Can Never Die comes in and rips that blanket right from under you and shoves it down your throat with such violence. This song sets the pace for pretty much the rest of the album – fast, aggressive, and with bucketloads of melody for good measure.

The opening riff on Pendulum is crushingly heavy but it isn’t long before the pace picks back up. The clean singing and operatics are sublime on this track and all types of vocals just work seamlessly and flawlessly not only on this track but on each of the tracks.

Bloodclock is a bulldozer of a track, it comes on and destroys. I love the soft intro part which is also repeated a couple of times in the track. Again, the mix of clean vocals and harsh vocals is a perfect combo and just goes hand in hand with each other.

At War With My Soul is slightly slower but still packed with just as much atmosphere, heaviness, riffs, harmonies, and gutturals galore!

Morphine Waltz is a more uptempo track and one that is “out there” for want of a better way of putting it – this is the part of Francesco’s journey where he would have been in a lot of pain and on a lot of Morphene to numb that pain and the music solidifies that part of the story perfectly.

Matricide 8.21 has a melodic feel to it, with a proper catchy opening riff. I think this is the second slowest track on the album but is still such a great song. The operatics on this one have an almost haunting feel to them. After I Can Never Die I think this is my next favourite song on the album.

Per Aspera Ad Astra comes in nice and fast. Fleshgod Apocalypse has picked the pace back up again and I notice the operatics mixed with the death metal vocals bring a sense of intensity to the atmosphere – amazing!

Till Death Do Us Part starts with soft vocals from Veronica and continues that way for most of the song. Francesco comes in halfway, then it’s back over to Veronica’s soothing and graceful voice. This is the softest and slowest song on the album but is also really powerful.

The album closes with the title track Opera which is more of an outro but is a perfect outro to this album and this newly defined genre of Opera Metal.

Every time I listen to this album I feel like I go on a musical journey with Fleshgod Apocalypse, the album is so structured, so layered, so well thought out, so well executed and so powerful. The sound quality on this album is superb and I find that once the song Opera has finished I find myself pressing play again so I can listen to the album all over again – it truly is THAT good!

Score: 10/10

Tracklist

1. Ode to Art (De’ Sepolcri)
2. I Can Never Die
3. Pendulum
4 . Bloodclock
5. At War with My Soul
6. Morphine Waltz
7. Matricide 8.21
8. Per Aspera Ad Astra
9. Till Death Do Us Part
10. Opera
Label – Nuclear Blast
Release – August 23rd 2024