Review Summary: A passage into arcane soundscapes
With Alight in Ashes, the reclusive Montreal based duo Menace Ruine endeavor to guide humanity on an enigmatic odyssey, rediscovering the paths that we have forsaken and left astray. Their gaze is set on an alchemical undertaking, transmuting the physical into the spiritual. Forgoing, or at least utilizing, the typical instruments found in metal in a mysterious, sometimes disturbing, manner; Menace Ruine place our preconceived notions of these instrumentations upon a pedestal offering them up as sacrificial lambs not with any hopes of condemnation, but instead to bear witness to their underlying beauty.
The movements here are all droned layers of dissonance and reverb, sounding at times more like organs and keyboards channeled through some nightmarish guitar tone. The pounding beats, percussion like in their hypnotism, elicit feelings of a march towards a burial procession. Indeed, Menace Ruine are engrossed with the idea of death as a way to life and not the other way around. Credited on the album as both applying vocals, S. de La Moth and Geneviève Beaulieu's voices aren't too processed yet still manage to have this foreboding peaceful result. Beaulieu in particular has a medieval folky vibrato, rich and robust, that invokes sentiments of esoteric knowledge as if the whole album acted like a heathen ritual ceremony. The ominous tones provided by the instrumentations seem less occupied with the life beyond and the metaphysical consequences of such questions, instead aligning themselves with a sort of pagan mythos of the here and now. Cautious and weary of the movements of celestial bodies our ancestors observed and revered; the helical rising and falling of our closest star--in fact, stars are a key element in the lyrics of Beaulieu. Her penned emotions, all entrancingly sung, are like mysterious woven tapestries suggesting themes of rebirth, the occult and metamorphosis.
The cyclical journey Menace Ruine invites the listener on at times might seem a bit repetitive to those not familiar to the tropes of drone music. "Salamandra" breaks up some of the monotony in the compositions as it is easily their most conventionally structured piece on the record employing the more traditional sounds listeners have become accustomed to. Nevertheless, the idea that the unvaried arrangements somehow blemish or tarnish the album as a whole is annulled as the essence and objectives of the musicians are skillfully applied. The eerie, mesmerizing appeal of the music at the end of the disc's run time has a calming effect. Menace Ruine have created a hauntingly enchanting album, perhaps, in hopes that through the auditory experience one can become initiated into the cult of nature; internalizing the dual properties of the universe. Poetically summarized in the Hermetic principle of polarity, "Everything is dual; everything has an opposite, and opposites are identical in nature but different in degree".
