Hell

Oh, maybe you're getting confused, darling: my outfit leans more towards the flamboyant drag queen style! </ghei> ... Really, "Epoch" is hitting you? Let me tell you what it is: that’s a foggy, melancholic, enveloping record; listening to it in the height of summer does not work at all. It clashes badly. A bit like the album by Les Discrets, I can't wait for autumn/winter just to be able to listen to it again...

"honorary members of the Gay/Lesbo congregation of Debasio" ---> present! :DDD Friend Declino, what do you think about the review of "Epoch"? A troubled gestation for that one too?

I haven't listened to it yet. I feel a bit foolish.

And if it were only for the technical aspect! A friend of mine absolutely hates Alcest and similar bands (so also Lantlos, Les Discrets, etc.) not only for the reasons I mentioned before, but also because he can't stand this new "trend" of pairing black (?) with lyrics that are, how should I put it, almost Baudelairean, probably because he sees them as pseudo-cultured (whereas I honestly find nothing pretentious about it; on the contrary, what kind of lyrics would you want to write for such atmospheric music? Pornogore?). Yet, the songs of his band are titled "Post Mortem," "Baratro," "Cenere"...

I just read the comment from my spider friend, and I must say I agree with him. Among other things, you have no idea how many convinced black metal fans detest Alcest: no zombie paintings, no raw production, no malice, no spikes, and no Nazi-fascist lyrics; too much melody, too many dreamy atmospheres, too much clean singing, and, finally, the lyrics are even in French. There is no doubt, then: Neige is gay and must die. Long live the true black metal.

"Storm Of The Light's Bane", great. "Reinkaos", stinks.

... Well, there's always someone who considers black a genre made by idiots and for idiots, regardless of what has been said so far; in that case, it's better to gently shift the conversation to another topic to avoid wasting time.

I think that, at this moment, finding a true common root to all the black sounds of today is almost impossible, beyond certain purely technical subtleties — for example, certain types of riffs or the scream vocals, but even there, there's much to discuss: take Alcest, which has written some of the most beautiful pages of black metal while singing normally, or the more recent project Les Dicrets, whose raw material is still black metal but completely transfigured. Nowadays, black metal has become a tentacled genre; it’s no longer about recording albums in the neighbor's garage and being true grim frostbitten and salamadonna… The influences are many and take the most varied forms: from the more thoughtful and progressive black (latest Enslaved), to post-rock or shoegaze (too many names to mention), to the most mystical and atmospheric folk (Negura Bunget, which I highly recommend), to post-core offshoots, all the way to unclassifiable sound entities like Blut Aus Nord and especially Deathspell Omega (the latter a band I unconditionally worship). In all this chaos of styles, there is no trace left of the typical 90s black metal, even in terms of production; try comparing the sounds of "Diabolical Fullmoon Mysticism" (the first that came to my mind) with any album from the bands I've mentioned before.