Artist: Alcest (France) Album: Écailles de Lune (2010) Genre: Melodic Atmospheric Black Metal The cover is an underwater scene of a mermaid chick lovingly using her long hair to cover up a man while he lies asleep. The half moon lights them from above the water surface, while jelly fish and other fish peacefully swim above them. Beautiful scene, really.

”Well that’s not Metal!” you might say. And it isn’t, and it’s not the only thing about this album that isn’t either. But Alcest is still labeled as Black Metal. Strangely enough that’s accurate and also not at all accurate. If you take Black Metal as the type that kills babies while they sleep or, slightly less extreme, make you feel down and depressed, the term is highly inaccurate.

But, if you look at some of the music’s constituent ingredients; tremolo picking, fast drumming, shrieking barks, you would draw a completely different conclusion. Sure, Alcest is highly melodic, but even that’s not so uncommon in BM that it wouldn’t be BM anymore. Alcest then is an oddball. An absolutely beautiful, perfectly round oddball. Reason enough for me to review this album, despite that it’s been out already for well over a year.

Écailles de Lune falls within what’s best termed as melodic Atmospheric Black Metal. But more than just being atmospheric, Alcest bathes in an intangible skin of beauty. Rather than using raspy distorted guitars all the time, Alcest uses a lot of cleanly played leads, sometimes combined with rhythm guitars subject to warm distorted amp settings. A lot of it is purely clean though, and melodies are so keened out that there’s no way in heaven or hell they could’ve been better.

That lays down a basis of beauty, light, longing and nostalgia with a touch of sadness over the loss of past times. Founder and frontman of the band, Neige, mainly produces his vocals in the range of fragile and mourning cleans, sometimes backed up by pure female vocals providing a carefully chosen emphasis. There are barks aplenty too, when also the music picks up speed viciousness and intensity, but for some reason those moments of frenzy have nothing on the moments of beautifully described reminiscing thoughts. Those are the parts that stick and keep the listener coming back.

When played while driving, the album doesn’t possess enough oomph or bass to be able to defeat the wind, tire and engine noises produced at speed. But there are two reasons why this is absolutely fine. Firstly, more bass would take away the beautiful fragility of the music, and secondly the music is just so relaxing there’s no reason why you’ll be traveling at high speeds in the first place. More like grandma’s-on-weed speeds instead.

Écailles de Lune contains only six songs that still add up to over 40 minutes of playing time. Ages ago, we already posted about the album’s closing track, Sur L’Ocean Couleur de Fer (On the Iron Colored Ocean). That was an amazing song and perhaps even the best on the album. The recent comments it gathered were my inspiration to order the album and finally give it a full review.

The first two songs on the record are parts I and II of the title song. Particularly the second part is a beaut, and will be today’s musical enjoyment.

I can’t say much else than that this album has really had an impact on me. For one it manages to keep me from driving like a fuckwhit, which is a huge accomplishment in itself. But in a wider perspective, it got me thinking and relaxes the hell out of me when it’s playing. Absolutely brilliant experience and not one you would want to miss out on.

My Grade: 9.5/10
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Tags: atmospheric, black, French, melodic, review

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