Alcest | ‘Ecailles De Lune’

Alcest are the new Agalloch. In fact they’re better than Agalloch. Or at least they’ve gotten better and better, whereas the latter have gotten steadily more boring. Alcest have now picked up their once impressive mantle of melancholic, dreamy metal with superb results.

It’s taken time for Niege to get this far, and each of his former outings have been marked by tentativeness. You could say with some justification that the last two albums have been too soft, or at least flirted with the kind of influences that don’t and possibly shouldn’t intrude too far into metal. Particularly this development out of erstwhile black metal.

Niege has stuck to his guns (well, nice toy ones) though, and made sure that this time round his music has sufficient power to deflect attention from the overall softness of it.

Power: not a word you’d associate with a musical project that worships the liminal atmospheres of Cocteau Twins and This Mortal Coil. Yet to listen to ‘Ecailles De Lune (Part II)’ is to be swept away in it.

Having opened the album with a rousing, swelling first track, his second is an absolute career best. It’s strong, charging and utterly stirring. The imagery of it is amazing, and sits right up with the likes of old Borknagar, Enslaved and even - yes - Emperor as far as hair raising, sky-looking, majestic black metal goes.

His past work was dreamy and langorous. While there are of course elements of that in here, it is more often characterised by a hitherto hidden vigour. Alcest is a Romantic band, in the sense that his songs are like drugged, Keatsian, splurges of lovelorn melodrama. In ‘Ecailles De Lune’ however, it works a charm - simply because both the numinous clean sections sit so well with the bombast of the loud ones.

Niege has really pulled it off. This is accessible, while rooted firmly in at least the third wave of BM. It takes the genre’s recent adoption of post rock modes (those swells), but marries it with 80’s goth of The Cure in an enormously satisfying way. So many before him have failed.

So there you have it. It’s an album full of aesthetics, but whose sound actually does them justice. What does that mean precisely? Well look at that beautiful Victoriana art - these songs are the sound of that bluey moonlit picture.

Some metal albums are allowed to soothe. We only have to think of Third & The Mortal for that. very few manage to stir also - and this is that album.

4.1 / 5 - Earl Grey ::: 06/04/10