This is not – I repeat, not – a syllabus for a correspondence course entitled “So You’d Like To Join the Circus: Carnival Metal In Its Historical Context.” To be honest, if you landed on this particular webpage expecting that you were about to read such a thing, I hope that you have little padded bumpers on the corners of all your furniture.
[Checks notes, finds “Step 1: Disrespect the readers,” crosses it off with a stubby pencil while tongue-tip pokes out the corner of the mouth.]
Southern Progress is the third album from Tennessee’s Flummox, and it offers nearly an hour of bold, overstuffed, progressive, antagonistic, devilishly catchy heavy music. In a simpler world, that summary would suffice and we could all declare victory and go home. But I know you all to be cannier consumers, enlivened by the perpetual thirst for knowledge. So! When I said that this was not a syllabus about circus-y music, I was mostly lying. More specifically, you will likely find your Flummox-ing experience particularly rewarding if you sup at the off-the-wall trough of things like Faith No More, Sleepytime Gorilla Museum, Devin Townsend, System of a Down, Arcturus’s La Masquerade Infernale, Torche, Caustic Casanova, or Unexpect’s In a Flesh Aquarium. This means that Flummox prioritizes a sing-songy melodicism alongside heavy riffing, madcap extraneous instrumentation, lightning-quick transitions, and a playfully anarchic sense of genre agnosticism.
The five members of Flummox each play with serious chops and wicked intensity, but as a whole they also telegraph a certain impatience, as if there’s simply so much musical, emotional, and cultural overload to process that they can’t stay in one place for too long. The album’s title track feels like it might have stepped out of Devin Townsend’s Infinity, and singer/bassist Alyson Blake Dellinger runs through one of the album’s best lyrics (of many) that touch on gender identity, repression, and self-expression: “When I die, don’t let them bury me in a sad boy’s suit and tie / Set my flesh aflame in the gown of a goddess burning bright.”
Flummox also dips their toes into funk/alt-metal, in particular on “Long Pig” (which includes some Tom Morello-ish guitar effects and perhaps the album’s strongest FNM/SOAD vibe) and “Always Something Going Down,” the latter of which is built around an almost impossibly catchy groove. Tonally, the album also goes through big swings, from the lighter-hearted (at least musically speaking) opening trio to slightly more serious sounds on “Femto’s Theme” and the organ-led ballad “Nesting Doll,” the latter of which whips up to a hugely impassioned vocal climax.
Southern Progress is equal parts enraged and ironic, so if you consider yourself a “no fun allowed” kind of dweeb, it might be best to keep on walking. Dellinger’s snotty, sometimes tongue-in-cheek vocal delivery is also mirrored in the instrumental approach throughout the album, where riffs sometimes spill out into big chugging breakdowns and other times run off in fleet, ‘extreme metal Rush’ flights of fancy. “Executive Dysfunction” has some of the most overloaded, wall-of-sound production of the album, with its blasting drums, programmed strings, and waltz tempo, while the relative more sedate “Locust Eater” reminds me a bit of At the Drive In’s “Non-Zero Possibility.” Late-album highlight “Flumlindalë,” with its nonsense lyrics and full-screen maximalism, feels like Devin Townsend’s Deconstruction (except good).
The album closes out with “Coyote Gospel,” which functions as both parody and interrogation of the hypocrisies the members of Flummox have experienced growing up Christian and queer in the United States. The song moves from mock sermon and praise music to a twangy waltz and then into a particularly manic Fantômas-esque midsection. It erupts into a squall of noise, flirts with lo-fi twee folk, and then finally bursts into a glorious crescendo of an indictment: “If Christ came today, He’d be ashamed / And put in chains by those proclaiming His name.”
The great trick that Flummox pulls on Southern Progress is that these heavy, moralistic themes aren’t delivered with a heavy hand. Instead, they sass you to your face and carve out a place where empathy should live with deft songwriting chops and punishing heaviness. It’s not the circus, but they still want you to step right up.
