If my wife was ever tasked with inventing a black metal band she’d like, I have a feeling she’d conjure up something that sounds a lot like Alcest on account of Alcest sounding more and more like a shoegaze band than a black metal one. Indeed, Mr. Alcest himself, vocalist/guitarist/keyboardist/bassist Neige, has built his French band into a crystal tower with celestial reach, a golden, opulent artifact that stands warm and bright in an otherwise dark and cold world. That’s not to say, however, that Les voyages de l’âme (or, if you prefer, Journey of the Heart), is one big dreamy wash of lush sound because it so happens that it stands on a very strong foundation of aggressive folk metal, but Neige’s preference for the soft, clean vocals over the growls (skip straight to “Là où naissent les couleurs nouvelles” or “Faiseurs de mondes” if you want to hear the latter) certainly elevates the album to ethereal heights. Much like 2010′s Écailles de lune, Les voyages de l’âme magically weaves intricate and ambient guitar work with blasting tempos for an altogether fantastical marriage of romance and war, its beauty found in its strength, its strength found in its beauty.
Check out the video for “Autre temps” from Les voyages de l’âme!
Behold! The Monolith Defender, Redeemist
BTM Records
As proven before, Behold! The Monolith’s stoner sludge is for subhumans only, and it is on Defender, Redeemist, their second full-length, that the LA trio delve further into the subterranean, digging out their descent with sledgehammers, not shovels. Defender, Redeemist is rife with ground and pound riffs, and tracks like “Halv King,” “Desolizator,” “We Are the Worm,” and “Witch Hunt Supreme” are a glorious feast of mud pies and smegma cakes, each one belching out High On Fire fury amidst tremulous and atmospheric aggression. However, it’s on the album’s three longest songs, “Redeemist,” “Cast On The Black/Lamentor/Guided By The Southern Cross,” and “Bull Colossi,” that the band is at its most heinous, laying down an ageless, soul-sucking black metal doom that ebbs, flows, and screams in myriad glorious ways. Add to that Billy Anderson’s production work and Dusty Peterson’s art work (which kind of reminds me of a re-imagined Screaming for Vengeance), and Defender, Redeemist is one hell of a monster on so many different levels.
Yes, Rising’s To Solemn Ash was released last year overseas, but since this here is its North American release, I don’t feel tardy in telling you all about its sludgy goodness, dig? Following a four-song EP in 2009 and a 7″ single in 2010, To Solemn Ash finds the Danish trio finally putting a massive effort into a full-length, and oh what a monumental design it be. As though guardians of some Copenhagen castle, gargoyles perched high in the blackest of skies, Rising preside over the kingdom of heavy with a stony, melodic glare. The swirling storm that is To Solemn Ash swells with opener “Mausoleum,” its dark, corpse-painted intro-riffing eerily akin to Behemoth’s “Ov Fire and the Void,” but as the album thunders on, it comes to pass that Rising were not born of the extreme black, but that they are, in fact, doomed descendants of the Baroness bloodline. So they carry themselves accordingly throughout, beset by beasts both basilisk and sharp-toothed hound, themselves grotesque creatures commanding a thick rush of temper-metal weather and spreading brutally fancy dread.
Alcest
Behold! The Monolith
Rising