Review Summary: Three ragas to awaken the sleeping sun
Brussels homies Neptunian Maximalism continue to live up to their name: sprawling compositions, cosmic ambition, and a total disregard for digestible formats. And yet, despite its 1h40 runtime,
Le Sacre du Soleil Invaincu unfolds with an almost disarming ease - like a trance where all sense of time dissolves, swallowed by the slow rise of ritual drones and metallic bursts that are as esoteric as they are visceral. It's not just that the music is long; it's that time itself seems to be warped by its gravity. Tracks stretch and coil like smoke; the longer they spiral, the more hypnotic they become.
Where
Éons - their first and already monumental album - approached the apocalypse through sheer sonic saturation,
Le Sacre du Soleil Invaincu feels brighter and more patient (it's all relative!).
Éons was a deluge, a churning storm of layers and textures meant to sonify the collapse of time and the world's end. Its chaos was overwhelming by design – a mass of sound that threatened to crush the listener under its weight.
Le Sacre du Soleil Invaincu, by contrast, opens up. It doesn't sacrifice complexity, but it employs that complexity differently. There is more breathing room between the layers, with more suspended drones and subtle shifts that allow the music to sprawl without suffocating. Tension still pulses beneath the surface, but it's paced with a different kind of wisdom – less like a panic attack and more like a guided ritual.
The formula hasn't changed on the surface though: long droning incantations, free jazz outbursts, guttural vocals, and evolving structures where metal collides with Eastern scales and tribal rhythms that seem to summon ancient forces. But the overall tone has shifted. If
Éons evoked primordial chaos – the violent emergence of matter, time, or gods – then
Le Sacre du Soleil Invaincu is about transcendence, about aligning with something radiant and unknowable. It's no longer focused on destruction but rather on transformation. The fire isn't meant to consume – it's meant to illuminate. This is not a soundtrack for the end of the world, but for something reborn from its ashes. Think less of cataclysm and more of cosmic awakening. The result is a kind of ecstatic density: overwhelming yet oddly serene, like a pagan ceremony on acid.
This shift becomes even more tangible in the structure of the record.
Le Sacre du Soleil Invaincu is divided into three movements, each inspired by a different raga from Indian classical music: Raga Marwa, Raga Todi, and Raga Bairagi. This is not merely a superficial reference; it profoundly shapes how the album moves and breathes. In Indian tradition, ragas aren't just scales or modes; they serve as emotional frameworks associated with specific times of day, moods, and states of consciousness. Raga Marwa evokes a sense of anxious twilight tension, capturing the feeling of impending nightfall. In contrast, Todi is meditative and melancholic, often associated with introspection. Bairagi, typically performed at dawn, embodies a serene, devotional energy. These associations bleed into the album's progression: the first movement balances tension and release, the second delves into a deeper, almost mournful trance, and the final movement culminates in a luminous, otherworldly resolution. It's not a literal adaptation of these ragas but rather a transposition of their emotional arcs into the language of Neptunian Maximalism - expressed through drones, metallic bursts, and ritualistic repetition. The result is a composition that feels both expansive and guided, free-form yet profoundly intentional. This raga-based scaffolding gives the album a ceremonial logic: not just a sequence of songs, but a slow metamorphosis, shaped by centuries-old musical archetypes filtered through amps and distortion.
With
Le Sacre du Soleil Invaincu, Neptunian Maximalism prove once again that extreme music can still be a mystical act – a space for elevation, not just aggression. And that excess, when it's this well executed, can become a portal. There's no compromise here, no dilution – only a raw, unfiltered devotion to the idea that music can still be sacred, still be vast, still point to something beyond us.
