Alcest – Les voyages de l'âme

January 6, 2012 • Prophecy Productions

Few people were looking forward to hearing new material from Alcest this year, especially after seeing them live last year. Even though Écailles de lune fell a little bit under my expectations (how can one follow up their godly debut album, anyway?) I was excited for this one. While it's a bit more of the same thing heard on the last album, it certainly isn't bad, even though it still can't stand up to the first one.

The sound on this album is pretty much identical to that of Écailles de lune—melancholy riffing with electric guitars, very basic drumming, and 99% clean vocals (Neige's awesome screaming pops up in just a couple places, and I do miss it). While it's still enjoyable, it is admittedly getting a bit generic and I feel like I can't tell the difference at all between the two albums. Whether that is a good or a bad thing is obviously up to the individual listener; I tend to see making the same album twice in a row as generally (not always) a bad thing, even if it's a really good album. Here I find myself getting bored (maybe jaded?) a bit more often than I think I ought to be (see "Beings of Light", five minutes of repetitive and generic black metal riffing).

But again, it's definitely not a bad album by any means, and Alcest probably isn't going downhill just yet. There are still some truly great moments on the album, and even if some songs seem to drag on there are points where the riffs and atmospheres are really great, such as the end of the title track, about 2:20 into "Faiseurs de mondes", or most of "Summer's Glory".

Like I said it's still nowhere as good as Souvenirs d'un autre monde and I didn't expect it to be—Alcest has gotten a bit too comfortable, perhaps, and we'll probably never hear anything diverse and interesting from them like "Tir Nan Og" anytime soon. But there's still life in the band and Les voyages de l'âme is still good, even if it's not exactly what I want from Alcest at this point.

3.0/5.0

Olivier Messiaen – Turangalîla-Symphonie / Quatuor pour la fin du temps / Thème et Variations

July 22, 2008 • EMI Classics

I'm always hesitant to listen to anything labeled "modern classical". It's such a diverse label you could get anything—a work like Gustav Holst's The Planets (one of my all-time favorite works) is so far from something like Karlheinz Stockhausen: epic, romantic majesty vs. cold, impenetrable dissonance. Olivier Messiaen is a composer who I'm not very familiar with but, even aside from him sounding like a very interesting individual, his work holds up as some modern classical that I can definitely appreciate and enjoy. This particular compilation presents older recordings of three different works: Turangalîla-Symphonie, Quatuor pour la fin du temps (the famous "Quartet for the End of Time", the piece that attracted me to this album in the first place) and Thème et Variations for violin and piano.

Turangalîla-Symphonie somehow manages to straddle the position between the aforementioned Planets and Stockhausen album I reviewed; it's composed on a grand scale for a large group, with some very dramatic and distinctive melodies and motifs, although it often jumps into more chaotic and dissonant segments, giving it a very disorienting and anxious feel. Normally I'd probably hate this kind of thing, but here I think it actually works pretty well; Messiaen keeps things way more interesting than I thought at first and it's impossible to get bored listening to this piece (although its length—ten movements! the nerve!—can be a bit daunting, and that means it does drag a bit near the end). There are a lot of nods to romantic period music (one of my favorite styles), but it never gets too sappy or droll thanks to the overall variety the piece has.

It's a bit of a tough piece to get into, though, and on my first listen I found it pretty alienating. Fortunately it's grown quite a bit on me, and I think it's helped me understand the more experimental side of modern classical a bit more, since it helps to balance out its serialist-type segments with more melodic bits. And, of course, I just like it—it's simply a really neat piece overall (although the slide whistle is more than a bit silly).

Quatuor pour la fin du temps presents a different side of Messiaen. It was written during his time as a prisoner during World War II, which helps explain the odd selection of instruments—it was apparently the only selection of professional musicians in the prison at the time. Now knowing a bit of history about the piece has made me listen to it in an entirely different way, as I can tell that the music is entirely appropriate for the situation.

Like Turangalîla-Symphonie, the Quatuor employs a lot of dissonant melodies, but obviously with much more sparse instrumentation. This really lends itself well to the very thematic approach taken with the piece, which mostly evokes the apocalypse (the book of Revelation was inspiration). Therefore the suite isn't just "sad" in the typical sense: it conveys a feeling of utter despair throughout; the music is often very slow and reflective, and when it isn't slow it's to contrast the despair and make it that much more intense. A standout example is the third movement, "Abîme des oiseaux" for solo clarinet, which alternates between low, incredibly slow droning notes and flittering runs (inspired by birdsong, in Messiaen fashion) that conflict brilliantly. I also enjoy the use of unusual tempos: movement III is merely 22 beats per minute, and movement V is "infiniment lent"—"infinitely slow".

Thème et Variations is a bit more generic compared to the first two pieces on this release, and it sounds like a lot of the other serialism pieces I've heard. It's kind of a shame that it was included because it's pretty much impossible to follow up Quatuor pour la fin du temps, let alone outshine it, and the movements are very short and breeze by so fast that it's just not very memorable, making it very difficult to comment on. It would have been nice to hear these on their own release, one that could do them justice, perhaps alongside similar duets. It's certainly not bad, and the last movement is quite beautiful in its own right, but I can't help feeling like the whole piece simply shouldn't have been included.

Still, if you're looking for something to help ease you into either Messiaen's work or the more atonal side of modern classical in general, this is definitely a recording to pick up. Both Turangalîla-Symphonie and Quatuor pour la fin du temps are fantastic works that should not be missed; I'm definitely glad I finally heard them myself.

3.5/5.0

KK Null – Peak of Nothingness

December 2000 • Hushush

KK Null is one of those names in underground music that I seem to have heard quite a bit before I actually heard anything by him, despite the fact that he has (reportedly) released over a hundred albums. With that kind of prolificacy, it's difficult to keep quality control (something I've written about before) and albums by such artists are always a crapshoot. Unfortunately, with the album I chose, things didn't turn out so well.

Despite his reputation for particularly loud music (see his band Zeni Geva in particular, they are pretty good), Peak of Nothingness is a very quiet album. It has an incredibly sparse sound, somewhere on the border of noise and musique concrète, with each track consisting of just one or two sounds at a time—soft pulses, whining drones, mechanical swellings, glitches, things of that nature. To me it's a very alienating experience, kind of like listening to those sound effect CDs that are just random, unconnected, meaningless sounds one after the other. Here, it's like that, where every track is stretched out to a couple minutes, but it feels just as meaningless and impersonal.

I'm not going to say it's the fault of this particular album that I feel this way, though; I've always found this sort of music to be really difficult to get into. The very repetitive music and minimal production results in a sound that isn't terribly engaging; but on the other side of things, it's too abrasive and random to be considered decent background music. So I'm a bit lost as to what the point of this kind of music is. I can definitely see some of these tracks having use as, say, source material for a more involved album, but on there own there just really isn't much to them.

Somewhere out there though I'm sure there is someone for whom this album will be appealing—after all, musique concrète as a genre does have a significant fanbase if I'm not mistaken. But I won't count myself among their ranks and I won't count myself as a fan of Peak of Nothingness; it simply doesn't have much of anything that appeals to me. Like my distaste for indeterminacy, I feel kind of bad blaming the album itself for being in a style that's out of my taste range, but what else can I do?

1.5/5.0

Lamb of God – Resolution

January 24, 2012 • Epic Records

I hardly feel that I should be reviewing this album at all; for the last few albums Lamb of God has pigeonholed themselves into a sound that hasn't changed for years. Having heard their last album, Wrath, I am having trouble telling the difference between that and this one, and consequently Resolution hardly offers any reason to listen to it.

If anything, the band's signature style of groove metal has only gotten a bit safer and poppier—songs have more structure, riffs are catchier, drums are groovier. Sometimes that's not a bad thing, and at more than a few points I found the music to be pretty nice in terms of headbangability. We still get a lot of nice breakdowns, fast chugging guitar lines, highly technical riffs, etc., all the things that give the band its sound. And for what it's worth they haven't lost their talent in terms of making this sort of music.

But that might even be part of the problem: they've become so comfortable with what they're doing that they can't break out and try anything new and different. I feel like one could make an album out of any track from Ashes of the Wake or later picked at random and it would sound pretty consistent. And that's a pretty long time to be churning out the same album time and time again. Granted, Ashes of the Wake and even Sacrament were enjoyable to me for quite some time but now I'm just tired of the whole thing; it's even gotten to the point where the last half of each track can be pretty safely skipped and nothing will have been missed. Going along with the songs having more structure and catchiness, that also goes along with more repetition and near-pop-like verse/chorus/verse layouts which, while they've always been present in Lamb of God's songs, are even more flagrant this time around.

There is one upshot though: if you manage to make it to the end of the album, "Visitation" is actually a really cool song—I'm not really sure what makes it stand out from the others, but I really noticed it on my first listen. Perhaps it's because it sounds a bit more progressive with some more complex structure, dissonant guitar lines, some different vocal techniques, things like that. It's hard to say.

But regardless, the majority of the album just bores me, and I had a lot of difficulty going through it a second time. It's just more of the same from Lamb of God and I don't see any reason to listen to this over anything else they've released; it's just so jading. I'm not saying they've failed to make another Lamb of God album, it's just that it wasn't what the world needed.

2.0/5.0

Mathias Grassow & Thomas Weiss – Insights

2007 • Practising Nature

There are some albums that are just difficult to discuss. I find this happening a lot lately with the ambient and drone albums I've been reviewing; like them, Insights is presenting me with a challenge. The lack of substance present in such albums is probably the cause. This one is simply five monolithic tracks of lush, droning ambience. It's not a bad release, yet I am struggling to find genuine enjoyment from it.

Like Eno's Ambient albums, no attempt at any sort of structure or distinctive sounds is used, and there is little rhythm to be had. Rather, each track is set up by several looping (or droning) voices to create a relatively simple, yet thick and sometimes psychedelic, sound. There are lots of layered synths, a technique which in ambient music I find to be a bit overdone; although it's used pretty effectively here it's nothing mindblowing or mesmerizing. Each track is pretty much the same as the others: lots of droning with simple synth voices, perhaps punctuated by some very subtle rhythms or melodies buried deep in the sound.

It does make good background music, though; it's not intrusive, surprising, or unpleasant. The tracks do slowly evolve over their long runtimes, although this is nearly impossible to notice without skipping around. Unfortunately, it's also relatively dull, and listening to it with the amount of attention I'm giving it now is very difficult (a bit of a trend I've been noticing with the ambient albums I've been reviewing lately, e.g. Illumination). This is especially egregious on "Whole Pulse" which is the longest track yet contains just a simple droning sound that practically doesn't ever change over nearly twenty minutes.

As there is so much ambient music out there that I've been listening to lately I can't really recommend this album. Although it is quite good at what it does, it's not terribly compelling or interesting enough to warrant more than a passing listen, and there is simply loads more music like this (yet better) that I'd rather hear. Regardless, it isn't bad, and it would probably be a good idea to check out some more of Mathias Grassow's huge back catalog; I think he has a lot of potential and there is probably something great buried in there.

2.5/5.0