Album Art by Paige Weatherwax
Style: Avant-Garde Metal, Progressive Metal (Mixed vocals)
Recommended for fans of: Between The Buried and Me, Devin Townsend, Sleepytime Gorilla Museum, Mr. Bungle, Diablo Swing Orchestra
Country: United States, TN
Release date: 11 April 2025
Flummox are a band that defy singular definition. Are they death metal, bluegrass, circus music, musical theater, power punk, or psychedelic rock? If your answer is “all of the above—and then some,” you’re only beginning to grasp their ambition. Over a decade ago, Alyson Dellinger and Drew Jones birthed this Frankenstein of a band in the unlikely crucible of Tennessee—a state steeped in musical tradition. With the creative spark of new members and several years of maturing, Flummox hit their stride with 2022’s Rephlummoxed. With all its surreal, avant-garde grandeur, that album left one lingering question: how do you follow it up?
To understand how Southern Progress attempts to answer the album that preceded it, we first need to examine the structural blueprint of both records. Rephlummoxed built its identity on sprawling, multi-part compositions—songs whose lengths have a floor of five minutes and a ceiling of fourteen. The vast song lengths give the band’s pandemonium room to breathe, allowing the manic ambition to unfold at full scale. What emerged was bold, momentous, and endlessly engaging—a charismatic, aural riot fully earned by its ambition.
The architecture of Southern Progress sharply deviates from the long-form approach. Gone are the whimsical interludes and sprawling epics, save for the final song; in their place, Flummox attempt to use a leaner, more streamlined framework, with most tracks hovering around four to five minutes in length. None of the band’s genre-blurring mastery is lost—there’s still enough stylistic whiplash and personality to earn the approval of Mike Patton or Frank Zappa—but something about this new structural gamble doesn’t quite work.
A dissonance of expectation permeates this album, manifesting as a subtle but persistent disconnect between form and function. Everything that made Rephlummoxed soar feels truncated here. Something essential in the magic of their chaos gets lost when it’s compressed to the length of a standard pop rock song. That tension leaves many tracks feeling like incomplete snapshots of something greater, or ideas that might have been better served by embracing more conventional songcraft.
The first two tracks of the album, “What We’re in For…” and “Southern Progress,” immediately showcase the record’s fundamental confusion. The former opens with proggy, deranged grooves, then settles into a gentler, swing-inflected rhythm. From there, it pivots back into metal grooves that almost carry a sense of symphonic grandeur—only for Flummox to completely kill the momentum by abruptly oscillating between still sound samples and disjointed riffing, before trailing off into a full minute of ambient drift. “Southern Progress” then kicks in with an almost whiplash transition, fusing proggy power punk, death metal, and sludge. It starts off promising but soon collapses into a series of metal breakdowns that occupy far too much of the track’s runtime, before hastily returning to its original theme and ending without resolution. Both songs feel like fragments of a greater idea, pieces that would have been better served by being combined into one longer, more ambitious work.
Following these disorienting misfires is “Long Pork,” which assaults the listener with monolithic, sludgy riffing that drones through your bones, steadily building in intensity before attempting a vaguely post-rock crescendo. The whole endeavor falls flat because there either isn’t enough material to properly earn the climax or the song ends immediately upon reaching it.
Southern Progress closes with its longest track, “Coyote Gospel,” clocking in at just over eight minutes. Flummox clearly aimed to end the album with something grand as it’s a concept song tackling the hypocritical, cynical reality of Christian society. What they actually delivered, however, is a track that confuses concept with songcraft. “Coyote Gospel” comes across as a smorgasbord of ideas whose disjointedness outweighs its charm and gets in the way of any kind of momentum it could possibly build.
A few glimpses of coherence appear on this record. “Siren Shock” locks onto a well-structured, quirky southern metal aesthetic, with riffs that draw from the most charming corners of country rock—only amped up into a glorious rodeo that sounds like it could trample the stars out of the sky. “Executive Dysfunction” blends imperious sludge with tongue-in-cheek nods to Mr. Bungle, before shifting in its second half into lush prog and symphonic black metal. It’s chaotic, but perfectly balanced and fully realized, a rare moment where Flummox’s madness feels not just unleashed, but sculpted.
Ultimately, Southern Progress feels like the work of a band whose ambitions outpace their understanding of their own strengths and weaknesses—caught between the pull of vast ambition and the demands of focused brevity. Structurally, much of the album sounds like what you’d get if you hacked a random four-minute section out of a fifteen-minute Between the Buried and Me epic and tried to pass it off as a self-contained statement. Instead of embarking on a glorious journey across ten different dimensions of bedlam, you’re handed fractured, short-lived fragments of aimless indulgence. The ineffable eldritch opossum that defines the soul of Flummox can’t be contained within earthly constraints—it must either tame itself to speak the common tongue, or fully embrace its madness. But it can’t do both.
Recommended tracks: “Siren Shock”, “Executive Dysfunction”
You may also like: OMB, Schizoid Lloyd, öOoOoOoOoOo, Victory Over the Sun
Final verdict: 5.5/10
Related links: Bandcamp | Spotify | Facebook | Instagram | Metal-Archives
Label: Needlejuice – Bandcamp | Facebook | Official Website
Flummox is:
– Alyson Blake Dellinger (vocals, guitar, bass)
– Chase McCutcheon (guitar)
– Max Mobarry (guitars, vocals, fretless acoustic bass, keyboards, midi programming, percussion, trumpet, sound design, scoring, editing and production)
– Jesse Peck (keyboards)
– Alan Pfeifer (drums)
With guests:
– Jo Cleary (violin)
– Melody Ryan (flute)
– Braxton Nicholas (tenor saxophone)
– Eric McMyermick (accordion)
– Angela Lese (flute)
0 Comments