Review Summary: They did it for the lulz.
Let me start by saying that Les Legions Noire actually released some fine material, especially March To The Black Holocaust. Both Vlad Tepes and Belketre were excellent bands, but unfortunately Vordb is not able to capture the skill he put into Belketre in his solo project Moevot. This "demo" is so riddled with questions as to what is going on with each song and what the point of this 25 minute journey is. It's hard to understand how many see Moevot as one of those cult acts, unless a huge amount of black metal fans are dumb enough to fall for the whole "we're the LLN we live in a forest hail the black holocaust and satan" gimmick.
This demo sounds as though it was recorded spontaneously. The riffs sound like someone sitting in their room noodling away. No sense of rhythm, no sense of time, no sense of structure, just spontaneous playing. Sure it's an idea that one might find worthy to explore in an experimental environment. This demo, however, is supposed to be atmospheric. I can't think of one way that a clean guitar noodling away is atmospheric, it just reminds me of sitting in my room back when I started guitar and playing around. Another annoying aspect of the demo is the whole "evil half step" exploitation in several songs. It basically goes like this, take a minor chord, then raise or lower it a half step and you have an ominous sounding riff. Now when you just go back and forth between those two chords that gets pretty goddamn annoying and even though I can appreciate the brief seconds while the progression is being introduced, once it is repeated to death it becomes cumbersome to listen to.
Sure this music is dark and evil in sound. The thin textures of the all the songs are rather ominous, and the clean vocals on the fourth track are even pretty well executed (except for the harmony which sounds pretty major/funny if you listen to it by itself) in the style of a plainchant. The rest of the clean vocals on the album are laughable, little more than groans or wails that could be the soundtrack to any old B-list horror movie. The ridiculousness of most of the songs really ruins any good parts that the demo offers because it's hard to take Vordb serious by then. He really kinda just meanders around doing random riffs and groaning, and then when a good song like Chant d'Eternite actually appears, well you can't really take it seriously and appreciate the eeriness of it.
I can't really recommend this album to anyone. The minimalism fails dismally due to the lack of a strong repetitive theme in the songs, instead there is simply a meandering pointless array of noodling and moaning. Perhaps some sort of visual accompaniment would help stimulate the right reaction in a person, but when you need visual for ambient music to be effective then you know you have a weak atmosphere at hand. I still can't decide whether this album is a serious attempt or not. To be fair to Vordb, this was never supposed to leak in the first place, so maybe it is just a recording of him sitting around improvising on his guitar murmering random things for his own enjoyment. We will never know.
