Review Summary: Decent uplifting pop metal.
I'm not sure what the exact genre classification of this is, but very little of it is actually metal. That doesn't mean this is a bad album, but it rather something like the Alcest full length, full of major melodies but sans clean vocals. With a little imagination this album could easily be a pop punk album. Just change the instrumentation, distort the guitars less, and have clean vocals and there is no way this album would be metal. Production is squeaky clean as it is, and even with no keyboards there will definitely be references of cheesy melodies from many people who hear this.
The guitars generally play two roles, arpeggiated clean guitars and power chord/tremolo distortion guitars, a formula that fans of Alcest already know. This works fairly well, though it is a bit predictable and generally the guitars resolve to the expected chords and never do anything surprising or out of the ordinary harmonically. There are several psuedo black metal moments where the mood is meant to become darker, but in the context of the light melodies these sections are generally ineffective. There is an interesting section using natural harmonics in Ruines Humaines, but in all the guitars do little out of the ordinary or attention grabbing.
Rythmically the bass and the drums are very standard, they are produced as cleanly as the vocals and guitars and do little besides venturing outside of their time-keeping role. This is not unusual for the metal genre, but with this albums unique style, hearing a more counter-point oriented bass line would be very suiting and interesting. Drumming could also perhaps use some syncopation to break the monotony of repeated sections a bit.
The vocals are really what saves this album for me. The very harsh and almost distorted vocals contrasted against the light uplifting acoustics and riffs make a very nice combination for me. I think where Alcest failed was the monotonous clean vocals, intriguing at first, but void of emotion after a few songs. The shortness of the EP and the intensity of the vocals make this more interesting. The clean female vocals on Faiblesse Des Sens are an unwelcome change, very monotonous, and when they try to go harsh near the end of the song they just sound very sloppy and weak.
The album has little of the atmosphere that the black metal label might suggest. Sure the influence is there, mainly in the arrangement, namely tremolo guitars, straight forward drums, relatively simple structure. The melodies and progressions are distinctly more influenced by more upbeat styles of music. The progressions are even pleasant and easy on the ears, certainly something that one would not think of in a black metal band. Of course if I was reviewing this as a straight up black metal album the rating would be far lower, however, the black metal influence feels odd on the first two songs (the last being void of any distinguishable metal influence).
The room for improvement is there, namely to actually make the production a bit worse in the sense that the instruments sound edgier and more aggressive, and that the melodies can really meld better with the vocals, because even though the juxtaposition is nice, it is odd and would be even better if the guitars were dirtier. The album is just too pleasing, it does not demand the listeners attention, it is far too predictable in it's passages and structure. There are no moments were the music goes somewhere else and demands our attention, it is simply an album that can be enjoyed easily, but not a classic that truly breaks the limits of the genre. What the album does do is incorporate some non metal influences nicely, making it a good listen every once in a . Recommended only to those into more melodic styles of metal, fans of the Darkthrone/Burzum/Bathory/Beherit school should avoid this altogether.
