The French have a rich history of creating avant-garde black metal, let's see if this band falls into that or just blast beats us into oblivion. They start off as being more folky than what typically comes out of France, so suspecting blast beats to follow. The second song begins to conform to my theory as it reminds me of the raw black metal coming out of Finland, think Horna here, but the vocals carry an angrier rasp. Shifting into more of a march feels better to my ears and the vocals drop into a more deliberate growl as they shift gears for a third time in this song. Nothing groundbreaking in the first song, but they are good at what they do and seem to be angry enough. Two minutes in things drop down to the strum of a guitar for a measure and build back up so a few surprises.
As the album progresses they prove themselves capable of creating a more melodic throb that sometimes adheres to the more conventional aspects of metal. "Je Crois" is more conventional metal with the deliberate gallop it takes on making me think of early Iron Maiden, but with vocals croaking in agony. The more traditional approach to the metallic gallops they ride into victory upon, sets them in a similar stylistic zip code as Immortal, just without the big grandiose production that creates the booming epic nature. By the time it gets to "Orion," I am now always expecting big metal gallops. This makes the more aggressive thrashing of "Contre l'Homme" more jarring until they get saddled back up to storm the gates of Isengard. The guitar is more tremolo-picked which reverts to the more basic confines of black metal.
Things bubble up from a more minimal melody into an authoritative stomp for "In Ululatis Abyssi." With this, the song carries more form and function, with many headbanging accents. The title track marches off a darker throb while still waving metal's victory flag in an interesting marriage of sounds. All of that was drawn from the first minute of the song. "Peste Eternelle" rages in a more black metal direction, as they charge forward with an angry cheer. It works well enough, and is a dynamic departure from the more traditional metal sounds they lead us to expect. The last song reflects some of the themes from the opening track, they are run through a more tremolo-picked black metal that is a more wrathful attack with a darker turn. It is not a whole album of this but bookends the album with the more expected tropes of black metal while casting an apocalyptic shadow over things This evolves in variations of this that play off a wider range of metal history, I'll give this album a 9 it's a fun listen and I appreciate what they are doing here.
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