Flood Peak – Fixed Ritual

From Portland, Oregon comes the post-metal/sludge act Flood Peak.

The relatively new band do have talented musicians. The album give us so much desperation and feeling of isolation compriced in the short runtime of under 30 minutes.

Slow, sustain drenched guitars followed by marching wardrums. As a stand-alone experience Fixed Ritual gives a healthy additive to your eyes. Especially if you are in need of some dark, foreboding, apocalyptic post-metal after 2020.

The thing is that there is not enough new elements for me to get really hooked to Flood Peak as a band, the entire EP runs with the flow and do give what you expect if you enjoy band such as Amenra or ISIS (the band). But it feels like they have not found their “IT” sound yet that differentiates them from the others in the genre.

Not until the last track is: “Secretarian Hilt” invites us to a more barren landscape than the other songs on the EP did combined. It starts of with such a glorious thing as a reverb-drenched, clean guitar tone that plays a beautiful little set of plucking chords that instantly puts me into a setting that paints pictures of if a “Mad-Maxian” future would be set in the US. Where the fields have turned into sandy deserts. The last of the civilization have turned back into what we all think that the “Wild West” might have looked like. Lone gunmen, famine, illness. The scorching heat of the neverending sun.

Fixed Ritual is by all means a decent record. Worth listening to if you want slow and angry post-metal. But the absolute top of this experience what finding “Secretarian Hilt”. An absolute glorious piece of written music where the best of acoustic music is blended perfectly with devilish guitar gnarling. I absolutly love that song, and i can’t wait to see if Flood Peak do more in this style. Where clean sounds meet the dirty and give us an unholy abomination of a record in the end.

The EP as a whole got way more attention by me after the discovery of Secretarian Hilt. But when the entire EP is released to the public in January 22 i am sure that this is the song that will (hopefully) get them on the map.

Good luck fellas. Hope to hear more from you soon.

https://floodpeak.bandcamp.com/album/fixed-ritual
https://smarturl.it/floodpeak_urnfield