Though I am loath to admit it, French black metal/shoegaze solo project Alcest somehow slipped by me over the years. The work of Neige (“Snow”), Alcest plays atmospheric black metal that features frequent ambient melodies and meditative harmonies that evoke barren landscapes, cold nights, and loneliness. At other times, Alcest delivers some of the catchiest and most brutal black metal out there. The combination of beautiful melodies and heavy hitting screechers makes Alcest one of my new favorite bands.
Alcest’s newest release, Écailles de Lune (“Scales of the Moon”), is a six-song masterpiece that showcases Neige’s incredible ability to express emotion through music, ranging from the tranquility of “Solar Song” to the haunting fury of “Percées de Lumière”. Each song is expertly crafted, ebbing and flowing from melody to melody, and though Neige sings in French, it is not necessary to understand French to appreciate Écailles de Lune. From the underwater guitars that open “Écailles de Lune-part 1” to the thrashing grooves of “Percées de Lumière”, every song on the album is, in Neige’s own words, “testimony of the evanescent visions/memories [I] had as a child about a fantastic faraway world: a plane of existence bathed in a pearly light, beyond all terrestrial beauties, which could perhaps be described as a sort of “intermediate stage” ; the soul would rest there between two earthly lives and would for some time be freed of the burden of incarnation.” Heady stuff, but the music does the ambition justice.
The album opens with Écailles de Lune-parts one and two, two ten-minute tracks that combine beautiful melodies and traditional black metal. Next up is “Percées de Lumière”, one of my favorite black metal songs of all time, a hook-laden ripper that achieves perfection not just at its beginning but also at the 4:15 mark when Neige unleashes one of the best guitar riffs I have ever heard, and then at 4:45 when he accompanies it with one of the most brutal black metal screams out there before resolving the melody back to the song’s intro. It is something to behold and gives another master of the genre, Agalloch, a run for its money. The album concludes with three softer songs, one of which, “Abysses”, is an ambient instrumental composed by Fursy Teyssier, the artist responsible for the beautiful cover art on Écailles de Lune and Agalloch’s Marrow of the Spirit.