S.I.N.

When you read the band's name, you can easily guess which type of music this French band is playing. At the program of this album you'll find symphonic black metal at its finest. It's too reductive to describe a band just by its style, especially when this band is playing such a controversial style. Many uninspired bands included some so-called "symphonic" elements in the late 90's or early 2000 just to hide their lack of inspiration. It's definitely not the case for Love Lies Bleeding, even though their next albums don't reach the same level, as if the band had put all his efforts and ideas in this particular release. But what an impressive masterpiece it is ! The first track, which is a symphonic intro is captivating from the very first second with this sad, melancholic, but yet dark and powerful atmosphere. The male declamation reminds me a bit Forbidden Site's "Ars Gallica", containing a romantic aristocratic feeling. As soon as the this track makes place to the next one, you can feel a progressive change with the presence of heavy riffs, extremely fast rhythms and high quality black metal roars.

Unlike many bands who just added some boring keyboard tunes because they thought it would create a certain atmosphere while in fact it just destroyed a bit more the rest of the instruments without any coherence, here, everything matches perfectly from start till finish. If you like Limbonic Art, Dornenreich's first two albums (by the way, this album was released on the same Austrian label than Dornenreich) and Anorexia Nervosa, there is no doubt that this is for you. Love Lies Bleeding are in fact quite close to their compatriots of Anorexia Nervosa, even though I would say that they are maybe even better since there are more variations in the songs which are all inventive and full of enchanted melodies. The classical touch you can feel in the intro will remain for the rest of the album and is mixed in a sophisticated and wonderful way with fast black metal. The frequent change of rhythms also enables to keep the listener concentrated and captivated all the time. There is a clear gothic and romantic touch which matches perfectly to the whirl of hatred and violence of the black metal parts. The guitar riffs are just incredible. This is the type of album which you will keep in your head and that will haunt you for several days, if not years ! However, as mentioned before, most of the time melody and violence, beauty and darkness, romance and hatred are deeply entangled.

There were some excellent bands from France who, in the late 90's, were part of an innovative, inspired and high quality symphonic black metal scene. Love Lies Bleeding definitely belonged to this scene after this album which was the perfect continuation of their good debut that was a bit more easy-going, less grandiloquent, but still a fair first release. What they did next was not bad at all and they remained in the same realm until they split up, but unfortunately, they never reached such a perfection again since their music became more repetitive and there were less rhythmic variations. The only drawback I could find in this release which also has an excellent production would be the quite short length for this type of music. Some more songs would have been welcome and would have given more consistence to this memorable yet underestimated masterpiece.