As anyone already familiar with Fleshgod Apocalypse knows; this wasn’t going to be the latter. There’s no mere nod to the classical here. While solos admittedly follow a neoclassical framework, both progressions and arrangements fit a classical mould far more closely than anything else while also ensuring that – unlike many of their technical contemporaries – each track has...Read More

My absolute favourite part of this EP is the first second of opening track 'Thru Our Scars'. Man is it lary! 4 stabbing chords and a gravity blast. Like chucking a grenade into a room before the assault proper begins. And you know the drill with a band like Fleshgod Apocalypse, it is a veritable assault for the duration of the 3 original Metal numbers here. As predicted in my review of Oracles,...Read More

Classically-attuned Italian death metallers Fleshgod Apocalypse seem to be pulling an anti-Coppolla with their releases. If you’ll indulge the strained simile, the band pooped out their Godfather III last year with debut album Oracles, which never managed to fully integrate their neo-classical compositions into the mix, leaving their death metal to override their overtures in a way that...Read More

Last year, Fleshgod Apocalypse's Oracles threatened to make some significant waves. A close cousin of the acclaimed Hour of Penance, Fleshgod crafted a claustrophic blend of ridicu-blast brutality and classical embellishments. The combo raised a unibrow or two, but, ironically, their formula worked against them. Their death metal attack was familiarly Teflon'd (it did, after all, sound a lot like...Read More

A few short weeks ago, we mourned the apparent demise of Hour of Penance, a fantastic band from Rome that a well-known metal blogger characterized in an e-mail to us as “the Italian Behemoth.” (The most recent NCS post about HOP can be found here.) Our one consolation was the knowledge that the other band featuring the multi-talented HOP vocalist Francesco Paoli — Fleshgod...Read More

Mixing brutal, technical death metal with classical elements, Italy’s Fleshgod Apocalypse exploded onto the scene last year with their debut full length player, Oracles (if you have yet to hear it, do yourself a favor and buy it now). Thankfully, the band isn’t letting us forget about them in 2010, unleashing arguably the best EP of the year in the form of Mafia. Consisting of three...Read More

You look at the cover art, check out the band name, read the album title, and get the peculiar feeling of something being a tad askew. But the seemingly strange contrast between the understood style of Italy's FLESHGOD APOCALYPSE and the album cover and title logically connect after one reads the lyrics and/or concept synopsis. It just so happens that the "tad askew" part applies to the...Read More