Gris
Il était une forêt...

"The Band defines their music as 'Black metal', even though no title can correctly represent their art." (from www.metal-archives.com)

Although this statement may seem vain and boastful, it is already evident from the cover that for this second work by the Canadian band Gris (dated 2007), one cannot speak of "traditional" black metal: the romantically fairy-tale landscape, yet imbued with symbolic dichotomies represented with simplicity in the evocative artwork, suggests not only the inspiration of the lyrics, generally centered on the eternal confrontations between joy, melancholy, life, and death, addressed in a very personal and visionary way, but also the atmospheres of some key tracks of the work.

Musically speaking, the sound of Gris can be roughly attributed to the Depressive trend, though focused on a massive use of synths and pathetically sharp guitar solos, as well as entirely instrumental and almost orchestral episodes, impossible to define as "merely" ambient; also noteworthy is the peculiar scream, gravely cavernous yet harsh and raw, the only element of the album that might raise eyebrows along with the high average duration of individual songs (around 10 minutes).

The entire "Il était une forêt..." (6 tracks in total) can be summarized in the first, second, and last tracks, certainly the most significant. The title track, placed as the opener, mostly recalls the production "Filosofem" by Burzum: the Norwegian’s music, however, is reworked by inserting darkly gothic keyboards bordering on the symphonic and vaguely similar to some passages from "Stormblåst" by the early Dimmu Borgir. If Vikernes is distressing and desperately exacerbating, Gris is hypnotically gloomy; if "Dunkelheit" is an impenetrable veil of filtered darkness, "Il était une forêt..." is a dreamlike echo stormily epic in nostalgia, a whirlwind Maelström of alienating distant memories crashing mightily against the most hidden recesses of memory. The following "Le gala des gens heureux" is textually the most interesting track: "The reception of the proud", introduced by a long sequence of applause and dramatically recitative vocals, becomes a metaphor of marginalization and violent condemnation towards the indifference of those who "witness the deterioration of values but pay not to notice"; musically, the refined and ethereal piano interlude is effective in enhancing the vaguely theatrical atmosphere of the composition.

The same theme (rarely recurrent) of the title track, the desolate memory of an idyllic cohesion with nature now vanished, is subtly concealed in the splendid and surprising final track: "La dryade" is indeed a ten-minute acoustic suite featuring violins, cellos, flutes, guitar, and piano. Though devoid of lyrics, with its sole and emblematic title, Gris captivates the knowledgeable listener with its particular melodies, recalling Greek mythology's creatures, the dryads, thus indissolubly linked to trees and woods and implicitly to the group’s naturalistic ideologies. The delicate symphonies of the piece, sweet and evocative, tint with the same almost childlike innocence of the artwork images that are as ecstatic as they are fleeting, confused and imperceptible visions of slender and sinuous figures, intoxicated by an enchantingly wild music, gracefully dancing in the shadow of an ancestral forest: it is simply the perfect union of folk and ambient, with a clear inspiration from classical music. The mediocre impact of a couple of tracks is not sufficient to discourage the album, at least to lovers of Depressive sounds, although the last track is worthy of a well-deserved listen by anyone.