I get loads of recommendations and requests through my YouTube account, but I’m not in the habit of responding to those. I get enough in my inbox, more than I can cover.

Through a lucky shot I did click on this band’s link and it immediately got me banging. The band mixes a heavy dose of groove with a mild melodies and a typical French originality, brought forward primarily through vocals.

The band, based somewhere near Paris, is a very young band, the oldest member being only 19. Trying to make a name for themselves, they’ve recently released a four-song demo which is available for free download (will link you to it after the jump).

When Viral Propaganda PR dropped this album in my virtual mailbox, I was keen to arrive at my first spin, as I had just made the comment that Metal was one of the few things the French were good at (besides food). Besides, the notion that H.N.P. contained “very mature composing” and was “mixing jazz-funk rythms to an extremely groovy death metal”, verily excited me.

While researching the genre of Groove Metal for this album, terms like Death Metal, Post-Thrash, Metalcore and Thrash Metal were hurled at my poor brain, which made me think that this genre is truly a crossroad on the map of metal. In the same way, the sound of Trepalium is a bit of a crossroad between the different genres of the, say, lesser-extreme side of Extreme Metal. Of course Groove Metal is the main peg on which every song on this album is hung, yet there are many influences from both Thrash and Death Metal to be found on H.N.P.

The advantage of having little time to review albums due to work is that there is more time to listen to albums. Consequently, Vorkreist’s Sigil Whore Christ has been on duty in my laptop’s CD/DVD drive for many hours.

Sigil Whore Christ. I guess you won’t be surprised if I tell you Vorkreist deals in Black Metal. The French band – they’re from Paris – have been active since 1999 and have released albums that all start with S and leave little to be guessed about the band’s lyrical content. Sermons of Impurity, Sabbathical Flesh Possession, Sublimation XXIXA, Sickness Sovereign. You get the picture: Satan’s the big man in the eyes of these dudes.

The band consists of five guys in standards line-up: LSK (bass), D. Terror (drums), A.K. (guitars), EsX (guitars) and Saint Vincent (vocals). Funny names, in true Black Metal style.

I am usually completely supportive of bands re-interpreting established styles of music, honoring the traditions set down by their influences and paying homage. However, there is a clear distinction between homage and copycat. French metalcore quintet In Trails haven’t quite crossed the border to the former, as proven in their début full-length Triumph In Suffering. Those acquainted with the Americanized version of Swedish melodeath will be instantly familiar with the sound here, combining elements of Threat Signal and Nightrage. Although doing In Trails do the metalcore genre justice, they never really establish an individual style, resulting in a feeling of re-hashing trodden ground.

After an intro made up of a melancholic guitar line and a continuous breakdown underneath, the album proper kicks off with “Kingdom Of Pit”. It’s a fairly standard metalcore number which does improve during the chorus with the Amenta-speed drumming of Leriche. The guitar and bass lines of Guerido and Allemand are entertaining on first spin, but quickly lose their appeal, especially during the frequent breakdown sections. The 4 solos on this album are evenly scattered throughout and provide light relief, particularly due to the over-powering crash cymbals exacerbating the breakdowns. In Trails do also employ some exceedingly fast sections which are more interesting (title track), but it’s not long before they drop into a slower ‘melodic section’ or a breakdown (“Virus Of Humanity”).

This project came to me by total suprise, and I’m still blown away as I listen to it now. Matt Gabnai, the man behind this one man project, contacted me over youtube with a link to his latest production called 77345_018. A somewhat weird name for a song, but I’m actually digging this.

From what I’ve made up from the biography on Minotaur Project’s Facebook page, it all started in 2005 in Matt’s motherland Hungary. Five years later he moved to France where he had more opportunities regarding music and recording, and 77345_018 is the latest results there of.

Today saw the release of Alcest’s long awaited (at least by me) third full-length, with a long French name I do not care to write again, but which translates as The Voyages of the Soul . Pretty interesting title. As of today the whole album is uploaded on Youtube, so I’m just picking out some of the highlights for you to listen to, before you buy this beauty.

Ok, wait. I won’t get you any highlights because there are none. This is one big fucking highlight to me. So at the end I will just dump you a link to a Youtube playlist with the whole album and I’ll wish you a whole lot of epic fun with this for the next hour.

We have some news today. Well, you can’t exactly call it news, since it’s a week old already. But that’s for a reason, because in that week, I only sat in my room, in the dark, while spinning the video 24/7, without being able to get up and do something. So my apologies for that.

So we’re talking about Alcest, who are a French Black Metal duo which has had some coverage over here already. That’s actually the place where I heard them first, and since then I was enchanted by their music. They recently released a video for their single Autre Temps, which I must say, almost equals my favourite song Souvenirs d’un Autre Monde.

This album has been described as Post-Black Metal, and, although I’m not sure what that means, I’m happy to go along with that. Whatever Post-Black Metal may mean, all I know is that Resilience is an album full of brilliant Atmospherical, Technical and Electronic Black Metal.

Résilience is the french word for, you guessed it, resilience, which means something like flexibility. I’ve been wondering what this title meant, but as I couldn’t make any sense of the lyrical content of the album, I thought it must have to do with the listener. As I discovered, one has to be a very flexible listener in order to appreciate the music, and personally, I had some trouble shaping myself to this album. It took me two months to actually start on this album, but yesterday night I saw the light, and I journeyed into the magic land of Smohalla.

A couple of months ago we published an interview with France’s Arkan, which was taken by Kilik2049. In reality Kilik2049 is called Simon and he is one of the two guitarists / vocalists in a beginning French band based out of Le Mans – yes, that’s where they do those 24-hour races. The band’s called Blind Tears and they do a grungy piece of Doom Metal. And of course we’re happy to return the favor and give them some air time.

They’ve got a collection of twelve songs out that they’ve titled First Tears. Catchy! It’s not all up to standards yet and the recording quality is poor, but it’s clear the band has some interesting ideas they’re working on. They’re mixing a very classic Metal feel with depressing darkness and doom elements. Sabbath and Iron Maiden are the most apparent influences and these then are mixed with fifty cans of bleach and fifty more of tar.

We paired up two bands with names starting with T today. Not the only similarity, as both bands will also deliver us a juicy portion of melodic Death-Thrash to enjoy. Next to T.A.N.K from France, we’ve also got Trendkill Method, not the first contribution from Latvia on this site, but after Frailty, long ago, definitely the first in a very long time.