Category:
Metal

Try if you like:
Amesoeurs, Enslaved, Isis, Les Discrets, Svarti Loghin

Just occasionally, when listening to something, it surprises you. This is not the surprise of discovering just how good something really is, but the surprise of the unexpected. You listen to something and it is so completely different to what you were expecting that you listen to it immediately afterwards, as if to confirm that your ears were not deceiving you the first time you heard it. So it was when I listened to Souvenirs d'un Autre Monde.

 

Alcest (for which read Neige - for this guy, Stéphane Paut, is Alcest) have developed a burgeoning reputation among devotees of black metal with his initial outputs, mainly EP's. However, Alcest's first true full length album is not quite what anyone could have been expecting. Rarely can the word beautiful be used to describe black metal, but this is precisely what this album is - beautiful.

 

Take the sort of dissonant, fuzzy guitars which epitomise black metal and then bury the sound in layers of guitars, sometimes distorted, sometimes acoustic. Push the drums to the back, not so far as to bury them but far enough that they require some intense listening to be differentiated from the overall sound. Then take the stereotypical cookie monster vocals and throw them away, to be replaced with a dreamy, ethereal, somewhat high pitched male voice singing in French (with an equally dreamy guest female vocalist on some tracks). That is the surprise. This is definitely not what you were expecting. It is almost as if Alcest decided to make an album which sounded like a cross between Ride and Slowdive, because if Neige has not heard of shoegaze (as he claims), then he has virtually reinvented the genre all by himself.

 

Not being a fluent French speaker, I cannot comment as to how this sounds to a native speaker of the language, but the lyrics (which I can read to a literal, though not figurative degree) speak of the innocence of childhood, and the cover photograph of a young girl with a straw (or flute) captures this almost idyllic atmosphere perfectly. Yet, the way the language is used as a musical instrument in its own right is enough, at least to English-speaking ears, to convey the beauty of the theme, though understanding of the words helps:

 

 

(From where I come time doesn't exist

Seconds became hours

Years of short moments no sooner vanish

And our deceitful words are replaced

By music and colour

Which float like perfume in the ambergris)

 

Apologies if my translation of these lyrics from the title track doesn't quite cut it.

 

Many metal outfits have tried to move into a zone of semi-acoustic and atmospheric music. Ulver may have been the earliest with Kveldssanger, but certainly Agalloch's The Mantle was one of the more successful. But neither can hold a candle to this. At times, both those albums can drag a bit, but never can that be said of Souvenirs d'un Autre Monde, even though each track lasts between five and seven minutes. Even within the overall shape of the album as described, Alcest still manage to surprise further. The closing track, "Tir Nan Og", about a Gaelic folk myth appropriately called Land of the Young, probably the best on the album, mixes in Irish folk to the melange, to quite superb effect.

 

When it comes to metal breaking out of the stereotypical mold then, this album raises the bar. It sets a new standard which others will do well, and find hard to follow. Whether Alcest can follow this up is something which will be worth watching. What is certain is that Alcest has come close to, or actually achieved in, releasing the album of the decade.