Chants de bataille

“Chants de Bataille” is a necessarily aggressive album, but it still contains the musical diversity that makes Belenos’ style so interesting. Acoustic interludes galore, clean choir-like vocal passages, and folk elements—all these make an appearance, along with high-velocity black metal. Loïc Cellier, as the band’s mastermind, is once again at the top of his game, delivering both caustic screams and furious riffs at the same time. “Chants de Bataille” might not quite have the epic atmosphere to spur warriors into battle, but it captures a more nostalgic take on past times, while staying true to Belenos’ personality and standing out in a sometimes bland genre.

“Chants de Bataille,” in regards to the main tracks, contains some of the band’s most cohesive compositions. The music is still as diverse as ever, varying up the tempo and calling on folk influences when necessary, but perhaps it’s the pristine production that makes many of the album’s black metal tracks so memorable. The production leaves nothing muddled, and it’s this clarity that makes the songs stay in the listener’s mind. When I think of Belenos, the first song that comes to mind is “Sacrifiés.” It opens with the glorious “oooh-ing” of Cellier’s clean vocals over the rushing of the drums and the crunching of the guitars. After making good on black metal, it returns to this call-to-war atmosphere with Cellier bellowing out something in French and an acoustic guitar meshing with the distorted ones.

There can really be no complaint made about the album when it comes to instrumentation. Cellier has always provided his music with diverse elements, furnished by a variety of metal’s subgenres and beyond. In addition, the drummer here, Gilles Delecroix, is more than capable of supplying aggression and diversity. The biggest flaw of “Chants de Bataille,” however, has very little to do with the music and everything to do with the album’s structure.

“Chants de Bataille” is filled with instrumental tracks that blur the line between filler and necessity. Most of them offer nothing but acoustic interludes, which are refreshing breaks between the album’s more aggressive tracks, but they wouldn’t come across as so unnecessary if the black metal tracks didn’t already have acoustic breaks of their own. Furthermore, very few are overtly folk and only contribute the sort of vague atmosphere you’ve heard before in a dozen acoustic interludes, to the point where some of these tracks wouldn’t be out of place as filler on another release. They aren’t badly composed or instrumented by any means but, when they comprise about a fourth of the album’s runtime (counting “Ode” and “P.M.Q.F”), their necessity becomes questionable.

“Ode” gets by as an intro, and many of the others, with their haunted acoustic chords, are passable. “Galv Av Brezel” is the most folk, and its meandering usage of a fiddle and a Celtic pipe make it the most interesting. In “Prélude Guerrier,” the filler becomes an ear-sore, as its bombastic keyboards seem entirely inappropriate for this release. Sure, “Chants de Bataille” ought to have warlike music, but Belenos accomplish this in their skillful alteration between lumbering marches and outright violent sprints in their black metal tracks. “Prélude Guerrier” is just overkill.

I understand I’ve ignored the main substance of the album by picking on the filler, but really the black metal tracks are as well-executed as any fans of the band will expect. With Cellier behind the wheel, they are more than adequate in veering “Chants de Bataille” away from what could have been a mediocre fate. The album is still light-years ahead of most of black metal’s stagnant releases and holds its ground firmly in Belenos’ discography. “Chants de Bataille” should not be ignored, and in many ways the frequent breaks between black metal tracks and the accessible production give the album lasting longevity.