Le Frozen Fest c'est dans 15 jours !
Le moment parfait pour revenir sur l'histoire du Label Frozen Records, véritable success story et désormais institution de la scène €metal française !
#FrozenRecords #Interview #Hardcore #PostPunk #FrozenFest #Nantes #Metalheads
Sorcerer – Devotion [Things You Might Have Missed 2024]
By Mystikus Hugebeard
French melodic hardcore act Sorcerer released Devotion all the way back in March, and I’ve been listening to it regularly since then. It made quite an impression on me in that time, but I feel it necessary to admit that the strongest impression left on me is the expression of the man on the album cover. Every punch his face has suffered stripped away another wall, revealing in turn indignation, sorrow, confusion, exhaustion, acceptance, and even a subtle bloodlust. It’s the face of a man lost in his world of violence, as senseless as it is inescapable, and Devotion paints a vibrant and unforgettable image of this violence.
One of the strongest aspects of Devotion is simply how great it sounds. Devotion is unquestionably hardcore music, but it’s much deeper and dirtier than most hardcore I’ve heard before. This isn’t to say the production is raw or anything. The guitars are crisp with a subtle buzz that shines during the heaviest riffs, and the bass has a hefty chug like it’s throwing its full weight around. What really sticks out for me are the vocals; hardcore music can live or die on its vocals, and I can comfortably say that Sorcerer’s vocalist is a cut above. He has a coarse, exhausted yell that sounds both professional and like a passionate newcomer screaming their voice to shreds. It’s a shockingly good vocal performance that sounds unhinged without losing control. The guest vocalists on “Fortress” and “In the Arms of Mortality” are both solid screamers, but I’d be lying if during their sections I wasn’t selfishly thinking to myself “alright yeah but bring back the other guy.”
The strength of Devotion’s sound allows the music to cut all the deeper, lending an unstoppable momentum to the riff onslaught. The strongest, heaviest sections aren’t imprisoned only to the breakdowns, allowing entire songs to be dynamic and memorable. There are standard thrashers like “The Eternal Grief” and “Devotion” if you want a quick fix of violence. Still, I love the more adventurous songs, like the seven-minute closer “Someone Else’s Skin” which closes on my favorite kind of escalating riffs with growing layers of noise. “The Bell Jar” is a crazy fun tune that cycles through tons of catchy ideas at a fast pace, and the massive opening verses of “Badlands” and “In the Arms of Mortality” are addictive. The aggression and energy is always high, but it feels focused on a single point; if I were to describe the spirit of hardcore music as the frenetic chaos that comes with the flailing of arms in a mosh pit, then the music of Devotion is targeted violence, focused into a singular, unstoppable beat-down.
At just over 30 minutes, Sorcerer’s Devotion is a slick and brutal album with violence in its heart and without any low points that I’ve been revisiting like clockwork for months now. It’s just the right kind of heavy that hits all the harder for how focused it is. I’d wager that the beefy guitar tone and stellar vocal performance might even convert some listeners who have never been all too into hardcore music. Or maybe I’m wrong, in which case Devotion will leave you lookin’ like the guy on the cover.
Tracks to Check Out: ”Badlands,” “In the Arms of Mortality,” “Fortress,” “The Bell Jar,” “Someone Else’s Skin”
#2024 #DelivranceRecords #Devotion #FrozenRecords #Hardcore #Mar24 #MelodicHardcore #Sorcerer #ThingsYouMightHaveMissed2024 #TYMHM
By Thus Spoke
In describing his project, and personal philosophy that guides it, Guillaume Galaup—the individual behind Limbes, as well as Blurr Thrower—speaks of the power that forms between opposites. The one, limbo (Limbes in French), light, ethereal, and weightless; the other, nothingness (adem), total blackness, spaceless, silent. Both, however, are equally transcendent, and for Limbes, form the essential, beautiful, and sometimes terrifying space in which existence plays out. This abstract, metaphysical approach to existential thought could hardly be better expressed than by the medium he chooses. Noisy, droning, atmospheric black metal where synths and tremolos blur into one, and across which Galaup’s tortured shrieks echo. Liernes is an intense, cathartic representation of spiritual anxiety and anguish. Even its cover art,1 where an emblem of death and mortality supports a symbol of hope for eternal life invites paradoxical interpretation in line with Limbes’ ethos. The strict monotheism— as much a signifier of oppression as the promise of death— is a form of freedom from suffering.
And, in a way, calling Liernes atmoblack sells it very short. The vocals are too human, filled with a pain and a presence that’s easily distinguishable from the wailing instrumentation behind. The percussion, also, is too commanding, and complex; the use of multi-layered cymbals in particular a striking, and very effective characteristic. This is not to say that atmospheric black metal cannot be emotionally powerful and gripping—definitely not in a world where Mare Cognitum exists—of course it can. But Limbes’ music nonetheless extends its breadth, across to the ambient and immersive realms of post and experimental metal in its all-surrounding aether, but surprising clarity. And on the other end, it’s quite powerfully raw. Strip away the pervasive haze of melody, and you are left with blisteringly fierce black metal; the fact that the melody is actually there only amplifies the pathos of the yearning, bleeding scream that is Liernes. The choice to tell this musical autobiography over just four long-form songs adds yet another level of immersion, their gradual builds and falls filling the proverbial air and drowning all else out.
As you listen (and relisten, and relisten) to Liernes, it’s hard not to be struck by its sheer force. “Aulnes & Poussières,” opens the album immediately with a wall of semi-dissonant, wavering noise, and it’s not long before the percussion tumbles into full gear within it, and the high screams that play off the ever-higher, urgent tones of melody flood in. Layers upon layers of dense instrumentation build subtly but inevitably, threatening to sweep you away as a song reaches its next transformation with a lingering howl (“Aulnes…”) and a swooping, melancholic key change (“Buffet Frigide,” “Pied de Pilori”2). And as the anguished gasps of Galaup tug painfully at your heart (“Aulnes…,” “Pied de Pilori”), the aforementioned cascades of battering cymbal hits propel you along like a tide (“Les Côtes…,” and especially “Pied de Pilori”). This momentum is all the more powerful when juxtaposed with the dreamlike moments of relative stillness; post-metal calm amidst the surrounding extreme metal storm, around which the careless caresses of percussion resounds (“Les Côtes…”), and the gorgeous premonition of soft female vocals (from Kariti) haunts (“Buffet Frigide”). Reaching a climax of sudden and stunning potency, every track contains its own thoroughly enveloping catharsis, whether through the brute impenetrability of noise (Les Côtes…”) or dramatic vocal duet (“Buffet Frigide”). I would be lying if I said that during my own more vulnerable moments listening to this album, I didn’t feel the sting of tears.
Liernes may be built in such a way as to resist memorability., but this doesn’t undermine its strength. It’s partly a quirk of the subgenre it mainly occupies, though, as I’ve indicated, this is no standard, monotonous atmoblack. Rather, it is more like a dream that fades away with each waking moment that passes, but that you try desperately to grasp at. Its surface-level monochrome bursts into color with only the slightest of attention, so that, unlike that dream, you can relive it, however fleetingly.
Limbes, previously unknown to me, have taken my heart by storm. As visceral in its musicality, as it is in its emotionality, Liernes ought rightly to carry this project into the light of admiration by black metal aficionados. Brave its storm if you can.
Rating: Great
DR: 6 | Format Reviewed: wav
Label: Frozen Records
Websites: Bandcamp | Facebook
Releases Worldwide: July 5th, 2024
#2024 #40 #AtmosphericBlackMetal #BlackMetal #FrenchMetal #FrozenRecords #Jul24 #Liernes #Limbes #Noise #RawBlackMetal #Review #Reviews
Subterraen – In the Aftermath of Blight Review
By Thus Spoke
Sludge is a genre naturally able to bridge and wholly fill the gap between a rage that stretches towards hardcore, and a more pensive and somber emotionality more at home in doom, or post-metal. Therefore, when faced with Subterraen’s label of “Atmospheric Post-Sludge,” I knew this shapeshifting propensity would be amplified, particularly in the latter direction. Unfamiliar with the group before now, they instantly won me over ideologically with their ongoing theme that began with debut Rotten Human Kingdom. This theme, examination of the human condition from the perspective of our destruction of the natural world, and a defense of animal rights, is taken to its next logical step in In the Aftermath of Blight, which, as the name indicates, explores the nature of the damage humankind has inflicted on the earth, and looks ahead to the terrible legacy we leave. But enough about their concept, Subterraen are making music, which must carry its own weight.
In the Aftermath of Blight swings like a slow pendulum between malice and mourning, with much emphasis placed on ringing, blunted melodies that sharpen into focus for the most pathetic points and noticeably dissipate for the most angry. A healthy mixture of rough, barking screams and hardcore-esque shout-singing maintains an overall feeling of ennui and discontent, emphasized by the near-constant roiling and crashing of mid-tempo percussion. The atmosphere in question arises through fades into spacious, resonant plucking, humming bass, and the soft touches of synth that wrap guitars and vocals in warm abstraction at the edges of passages, if they aren’t warping and warbling all of their own accord, echoing the stringsmen’s notes. At the same time, the lurching, “womp” of pitch shifts as warm melancholic refrains slide into cold apathetic ones, giving even the melodic aspect just that little bit of satisfying bite. With a pleasing breadth from chilled-out to grungily gutsy, this all results in a very moody, vibey, extremely listenable record.
The best way to describe In the Aftermath of Blight is with the word “bleak”. There’s something indescribably sullen about the solemn stomping and washed-out melodic themes that dominate the centers of compositions (“Poisoned Waters,” “10:27”). But there’s also something indescribably plaintive about the more pointedly forlorn pieces that rise and float (“Paving the Way to Oblivion,” title track). And it’s the way that the latter frequently morph from the former—through atmospheric strumming (“Poisoned Waters”) or suddenly heart-wringing surges (title track)—that makes their relatively short lifespan and eventual passing into nothingness leave the listener feeling empty and downtrodden. This feeling seems entirely intentional, reflecting the lifeless, barren wasteland adumbrated throughout the album, and in its art. What at one moment is bitter at the next is blue (“Poisoned Waters,” “10:25,” title track), with languid, lamenting, stripped-back, and reverb-soaked refrains pulling wrath into woe (“Poisoned Waters”) and sometimes back out into stirring pathos (“Paving the Way to Oblivion,” “10:25”). Coming to a culmination in the first act of the closing title track, the tension between anhedonia and ardency manifests in a shifting interplay of melancholic melody and meanness whose hazy echo and ringing blankess leave a chill.
As strong as this impression can immediately be, Subterraen do little beyond what is necessary to make it. Comparisons to Yob, and Neurosis appeared in the promo material, and these are pretty much on the money. Perhaps too much so. The music is strong but without idiosyncrasy, managing to be solid and absorbing whilst playing, but fading too far into indistinctness when not. Similarly, there are stretches of In the Aftermath of Blight where things progress too slowly towards those finest, most beautiful, powerful, and impactful passages, that I now know are coming, and they pale beside them. The stirring refrains, woven through “Paving…”, arising in the back half of “Poisoned Waters,” and driving the title track are intelligently layered and satisfyingly steely with the help of dense sludgy chugging, and the balance of delicate atmospherics. The remainder is, as intimated, comparatively flat and dispirited; a vibe, to be sure, but one that appeals to a particular taste.
Despite anything said suggesting the contrary, I’m glad that Subterraen, and In the Aftermath of Blight found their way to me. Subtle, atmospheric, and poignant enough to feel like it fills a musical and emotional gap, even if it doesn’t blow the genre out of the water. It’s something you can stick on whilst musing wistfully on the state of the world. It might hit you harder than you expect.
Rating: Good
DR: 7 | Format Reviewed: WAV
Label: Frozen Records
Websites: Bandcamp | Facebook
Releases Worldwide: April 12th, 2024
#2024 #30 #Apr24 #DoomMetal #FrenchMetal #FrozenRecords #InTheAftermathOfBlight #Neurosis #PostMetal #Review #Reviews #Sludge #Subterraen #YOB
MUSinc
Angry Metal Guy
