Black Metal History Month - Falaise : "A Place I Don't Belong to"

The third album from the Italian black gaze duo , who were once more depressive black metal, finds them following the trail blazed by Deafheaven. It took me half way into the opener to really piece that together. The vocals are the main culprit. They are a mid range static rasp that screams in similar patterns. The music around them is pretty lush, more on the post-rock side than the shoe gaze side, but how many of the so called black gaze bands owed much to Slow Dive in the first place?  The opener and title track have the most melody in the first half of the album. The title track gets more furious when it comes to blast beats. This is balanced out against more textured guitar tones so they are not living on blast beats alone. I like the more melancholy spacious side of what they do. The black metal parts are not the most original.

"An Emptiness Full Of You " gets off to a good start then things get weird when it awkwardly breaks down to rain sound effects. Something that worked on older Shining albums , but here it loses the momentum. Then it builds back up thanks to some cool interplay with the piano to salvage the song. They continue to make grand gestures as they play with the formula on "Leaves in the Wind" which is more cohesive and the cinematic symphonic swells work with the song rather than against. Then the album ends with two of the heavier songs. The first of these being the almost more chaotic anger of  "Consumed Soul" . This is denser in it's heaviness than "Holding Nothing" which closes out the album . "Holding Nothing" is more straight up metal with the post rock grandiosity only floating in at the end.

The more this band experiments the more they put distance between themselves and Deafheaven. The vocals could stand to have more dynamics to them. I think even with Deafheaven this is a problem.  I'll round this up to a 7.5. If you are really into the post-rock black metal thing and just trying to branch out from Deafheaven, then you might be more impressed than I am since I have been listening to this kinda thing since Alcest came out.

Catching up with 2016 - Lascar : " Absence"

This album came out at the first of the year and breezed by me. It is a one man project out of Chile is pretty impressive.  After two minutes of tentative post rock the more metal side casts it rain cloud over the shimmering parade of guitar.When the go into the blast beats every thing falls into a more Deafheaven like blue print. The first five and a half minutes of the second song is the coming storm raging in your ears until it simmers back down for a few passages and is built back up into a sonically heavier crescendo. There is a lighter melody in the raging center of the frantically paced "Regions of Light". When it shifts into a more deliberate double bass section it once again proves blast beats can only go so far. This song is well done , but doesn't find the needed dynamic shifts to make it one that I would seek out and return to again.When you are shifting through the volume of releases that I do in any given week at the end of the day it's the strength of what makes the song memorable and stand out from the herd that matters.

Only four songs it is still around thirty minutes which breaks the "Reign in Blood " 28 minute mark quota I have for albums". One of the things this album has going for it is the bass is audible. The vocals are a one trick pony very much like older Deafheaven and really only hang onto a scathing mid range scream. The band finds it's footing the most solid  when a few bpm's short of a full on blast beat. There is a more upbeat mood to "Last Sea" thanks to the guitar melody that floats over the bulk of the song. It hovers around this for the bulk of the song's eight and a half minutes , which can come across as droning, but for very post-rock friendly black metal at least mood wise it is pretty enjoyable.

This is nothing new, but a fun listen that is well played. It could have been a little darker for my personal tastes, but I sometimes forget bands are not solely trying to cater to my tastes an have their own vision. I appreciate what that vision is enough to give this album an 8.