Blending their screamo roots with black metal passages only makes Frail Body’s newest album their best yet. With ‘Artificial Bouquet’, the exploration of moving past a loved one’s death gets more cutting and striking. Adding Jack Shirley’s mixing with the band’s refinement in compositions and writing allows the lingering emotions to embrace an unrelentingly biting quality.
Sometimes, as the imperfect human beings that we all are, there will be lingering regrets when it comes to situations where we could’ve done something more for people who needed help before their tragic deaths, especially when they are the ones who are reaching out to us, trying to communicate with us when we didn’t have the time to do so as we get tossed around within other priorities that surround us. Frail Body and their debut project ‘A Brief Memoriam’ back in 2019 seems to peek at encapture that certain feeling, dialing back on moments when a loved one is still alive, yet, looking back at those memories picks up a numbed and dilating emotion now that their presence is gone and nothing but bleakness blankets everything around us. Five years later after that brisk screamo debut, the band returns with ‘Artificial Bouquet’, capturing that sense of wreckage once again with a sense of expansion in their sound this time around.
Recollecting their bearings once more for this album, Frail Body continues to tread towards their screamo sensibilities, all with Lowell Shaffer’s scathing screams and the intensity of the compositions that have popped up on their debut project. This time, however, these characteristics are thrown and combined with ferocious black metal elements that allow their melodies to seethe and scar, implementing feral guitar passages and riveting blast beats that complement the band’s intensity and make it sound even more feverish. And feverish indeed, as the inclusion of Jack Shirley to help with mastering duties alongside Pete Grossman on production helped enhance the overall compositions and textures with clarity and fullness, making the album burst in enrapturing quality. The ragged guitar shredding of ‘Horizon Line’, the feral blast beats of ‘Refrain’ and ‘Berth’ where the former song’s melody eventually soothes with its rumbling grooves just before it soars into the horizon and the latter song’s guitar lines scamper across the blast beats with a sneering flair, and the manic opener ‘Scaffolding’ where the dissonant melodies just tangle to-and-fro’ are just one side of the album as the band eventually goes deeper into more of their post-metal escapades, with songs like the bellowing bass tone of ‘Devotion’ and ‘Critique Programme’ carries the blazing melodies and biting screams into the sun, so does ‘No Resolution’ that is quite more somber in atmosphere but still carries that humid tone in its composition, the melodic buildups of ‘Runaway’ that’s delivered with immense effect as the guitars charge through with a blistering quality, and ‘A Capsule in The Sediment’ where it concludes the album with melodies carrying as many exhilarating movements as possible. While there are a few nitpicks that kick the project down just a little bit: the odd panning from the start of ‘Monolith’ comes to mind and the bigger aspects surrounding the lack of dynamic vocal flexibility could’ve made the compositions even more blistering alongside the lack of chorus portions on these melodies that would’ve also allowed the emotions to hit further, for the most part, the production and tuneful melodies on the instrumental side are immense in their potency to overshadow those nitpicks.
It’s a ferocious listen, one that eventually translates itself down to the writing of the project. Just like their debut, the band expresses the themes of loved ones passed on, yet Frail Body’s exploration of this theme is expanded with a fuller picture as the lyricism carries more weight in its poetry, allowing the eventual emotions to become devastating as the protagonist grips with the passing of a loved one, a passing that they can’t help but feel a sense of sting linger as they missed the call of that loved one when they were still alive and the letters that were written for them will never be read, all while the protagonist find themselves enclosed with societal institutions that never give help to those in need, instead just putting people in an expected position to keep on churning ongoing productivity. All of this eventually leads to the final few songs and the gut punch that leaves a dour finale, where the protagonist finally visits the material remains of the deceased loved one and the sense of that eventual loss leaves the protagonist feeling an emotional ache, which, even after they reflect if they have apologized for their mistakes and ruminated about memory disintegrating in their daily lives, there’s a remorseful anger kept to themselves as they try to keep moving on. Still carrying a pang of pain and regret at the very end, perhaps through fulfilling that final request from the dead, peace will be finally found.
Listening to ‘Artificial Bouquet’ more and more feels like a flame that keeps on burning hotter and hotter, the impressive trait of this project continues to increase as the ballistic compositions have an extraordinarily phenomenal tone to them paired with production duties from Jack Shirley and Pete Grossmann that allows these melodies to shred through with seething intensity, all while the barbed screams carry the harrowing emotions of the writing that grips at every turn. An overall refinement of sound and theme that might not have the hooks and dynamic vocalizations that could allow the tunes to get more crushing, when there are this many vicious markings on every element of this record, Frail Body pulled something remarkably enthralling within this wreck. Carrying faux bouquets might not impart the same beauty as the real ones, but sometimes, it’s enough to remember the presence of lost loved ones.
Favorite Tracks: ‘Scaffolding’, ‘Critique Programme’, ‘Devotion’, ‘Refrain’, ‘No Resolution’, ‘Runaway’, ‘Horizon Line’, A Capsule In The Sediment’
Least Favorite Track: ‘Monolith’