Les Discrets - Septembre Et Ses DerniËres PensÈes
Full-length, Prophecy Productions, March 29th, 2010
I find it moderately humorous and interesting that the first two reviews I have been assigned are the new Alcest AND Les Discrets albums. There are far more similarities than differences between these two projects. While I found the Alcest to be moderately enjoyable, this Les Discrets album caught my attention much more than the Alcest. For anyone who has listened to Alcest but not Les Discrets, the similarities are easy to point out. Clean sung vocals, acoustic and clean guitars that are clashed with more metal moments, creating a soft/loud and mellow/aggressive dynamic. Although I personally find a great deal of commonalities between LD and Alcest, I continually find myself seeing LD sharing much more of a sonic field with the band Agalloch. I usually hate name-dropping other projects in reference, but I could not get away from the fact of how much they are treading the same waters. The song writing is interesting, in the respect that they shift from a variety of different moods and textures, but as many bands do, they fall into the pit trap of repeating the same elements all over the album. Luckily, they do it well enough that it does not seem rehashed or convoluted. Another big factor helping LD is the fact that many of their songs are relatively short in duration. It keeps the pace moving along before the song has a chance to fall apart.
The instrumentation on this album is exceptional, since many of the melodies could be at risk of becoming too 'sweet' sounding, but there is always some element of darkness or sadness that keeps them from falling into that trap. Which I personally find to be a good thing. The drumming is well done, nothing too technical, but enough movement to keep things flowing and remain interesting. There are a lot of smaller drum fills and accents to compliment the rest of the music. The vocals are very well done, a cleanly sung male voice that actually sounds masculine. Oddly enough the singers clean voice reminds me a great deal of the singer from Bak De Syv Fjell. I would love to have heard some harsher vocals on the album, but I am hoping that is explored a bit more on whatever new release that they do. There is a great deal of potential in this project, that which I am hoping is explored more and more.
I enjoyed this album quite a bit, I would recommend it to anyone into bands like Alcest, Agalloch or Darkflight. Also to anyone who was a bit disappointed in the new Alcest, this album might be right up your alley.
7.5/10 - Review by E.
No comments:
Post a Comment