Alcest - Écailles de Lune (2010)
Track Listing:
1. Écailles de Lune - Part 1
2. Écailles de Lune - Part 2
3. Percées de Lumière
4. Abysses
5. Solar Song
6. Sur l'océan couleur de fer
I seriously love albums that can alter the way I look at a genre of music. By the start of 2010 I had lost a lot of interest in metal and was heavily into shoegaze, dream-pop and indie rock. Although I had already heard Souvenirs d'un Autre Monde I viewed it as a shoegaze album with a slight metal and post-rock influence. Hearing Écailles de Lune (Moon Scales) for the first time changed the way I looked at metal from that point on. The words 'beautiful', 'ethereal' and 'heartfelt' would not have slipped into my vocabulary when describing a metal album before this.
Listen to the reverb-drenched opening chords of the first track on this album and look at that album cover. The effect it has on you is like being transported to Neige's fantasy world, somewhere that is dark and haunting yet beautiful and dream-like. It's one of my favourite album covers of this decade so far and there couldn't be a better work of art to sum up the music contained within this album. The music itself feels influenced by so many different sources and gives me the impression that it does not care what genre it wants to fall into. It does not care about the boundaries of black metal and what black metal should sound like, yet the influence of black metal is clearly evident here. It draws heavily from the influence of shoegazing, yet it clearly does not want to be restricted by dense walls of guitar distortion and half-heard vocals. Even throughout the course of one track such as 'Écailles De Lune (Part II)' you can hear all these influences coming together and being allowed to naturally blend together to allow the music to take it's own course. The sound of harsh black metal-style vocals on top of uplifting and melodic layers of guitar distortion has never felt so natural while listening to this. Neither do the effortless shifts between harsh vocals and soft, breathy vocals, or the shifts between walls of distortion and quiet, atmospheric guitar interludes.
Even an album which defies genres like this isn't going to appeal to a lot of people. People suggesting that this is black metal being watered-down (and I have seen people online say this) are missing the point by a long shot. This is not trying to be a black metal album but rather an album acknowledging some of the qualities of black metal and using it in the creation of something else. A good example of musical evolution within the past ten years. Coming back to my original point about seeing a genre of music in a new way, this album opened up new areas for me and triggered a keen interest in finding musical artists that approached metal from non-metal angles, or artists that wanted to move metal into more untraditional territories, or non-metal artists being influenced by the atmospherics of black metal. Without this album I probably wouldn't have listened to Lantlôs, Les Discrets, Amesoeurs, Altar of Plagues, Drudkh, Deafheaven, Darkspace, Paysage d'Hiver, ColdWorld, Ulver, Woods of Desolation, Nadja, The Angelic Process, Have a Nice Life, Anathema, Agalloch, In The Woods..., Myrkur, Sólstafir and many others. I even find it hard to believe that this came out five years ago as it still sounds completely fresh to me and rewards me with something new each time I listen to it. I'm becoming ever more doubtful that Alcest will ever release anything near as good as this again.