Fumes – Skeletal Wings Threshold Review

By Alekhines Gun

As we slide from the snow-filled January to the rainy and fog-laced February, the mission remains the same: Checking out young hopefuls and their debut releases. This time on the roulette wheel of analysis is Fumes, a Mexican black metal band founded a mere three years ago. With sole EP Stellar Murders Upwards under their bullet belts,1 they’ve wasted no time in preparing their first full-length Skeletal Wings Domain. Is this the album to finally give Mexico a defined sound on the global scene, or do these wings need more meat on their bones?

Rejecting the stereotypical frosty Norwegian sound, Fumes present the listener with an album with a degree of weight to the compositions. Guitarists Henri and Alanis slather the album in meaty tones more adjacent to modern Ragnarok or Hades, with much more emphasis on bottom-end boom than trebly terrorizing. This gives a bounce and bite to the punky riffs, with songs constantly switching from obligatory melodic trems to Immortalized walk-in-place marching tempos. Moments like the outro of “Suppuration Tunnels” conjure up a genuinely evil mood, and solos litter the album with melodic flair while drummer Minos reliably blasts away in place. The sound is pleasing, immediate, and relatively accessible, with Alanis’s vocals echoing menacingly across the space with an expressive, enunciated bellow.

Where Skeletal Wings Threshold fails is in its memorability, and it fails in grand style. Things start well enough, true; “Stellar Ascension Infernal” wastes no time in going straight for the listener’s throat, but all too quickly Fumes suffer a startling dip in quality and album pacing. “Carrier of Venenifyer” doesn’t have enough interesting riffs to justify its six-minute run time, and multiple songs begin to fade into each other from bloat and pacing. Fumes try their best to offset this with heaps of solos, many of which are excellent (“Dead Morning Star” being a real highlight), but the end of such virtuosity leads right back to okay-tier riffing. Attempts at expected tempo assaults invariably give way to tired, slower passages, sounding less like tonal diversity and more like an album that refuses to commit to a mood. This inconstancy undermines the more impactful moments, reducing a full listen to far less than the sum of its parts.

Compounding this issue is the back half of the album, where Fumes saw fit to place no less than three interludes. These interludes are meandering, with no sense of flow or beauty, and seem to only pad out the album’s length. One of them is re-recorded from Stellar Murders Upwards, and still another ends the album in an outlandish attempt at post-auditory assault calm. There’s no need for three separate pauses in the music, and there’s certainly no need to stack them all in the back half of the album one after another. On top of that, the “real songs” from the EP were also re-recorded, stripping them of the raw charm the original production offered. Removing the re-recordings and two new interludes leaves us with five songs of descent to disposable black metal, and suggests the material would have best been served as a second EP. As it stands, songs replete with boilerplate hooks and bizarre track listing order give a sense of overwrought listening to an otherwise reasonable 38-minute runtime.

This is frustrating because I think Fumes can be a good band. Returning to “Suppuration Tunnels” in particular shows creative riffing, some deliciously dark-sounding moments, and a sudden grasp of good composition. But when taken as a whole body of work, Skeletal Wings Threshold doesn’t have the immediacy to stand next to its peers, let alone in the shadow of its influences. With their old material used up in re-recording, the real test will come at their next release. An extra tablespoon of blackened brutality, more immediate riffing, less interludes, and keeping those solos will do well in helping them carve a more memorable identity. For now, this is easy-listening black metal, from a threshold entirely disposable.

Rating: 2.0/5.0
DR: 8 | Format Reviewed: 320 kbps mp3
Label: Personal Records
Websites: Album Bandcamp | Official Facebook Page
Releases Worldwide: February 7th, 2025

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