Règne des morts

Borgne's mind-numbing space expedition for almost twenty years now has boldly gone where no one has gone before and shall never return. Their latest mission log is Règne des morts. Captained by Bornyhake and assisted by the members of his live team, this album is a very worthy addition to their discography and in fact may be their strongest yet.

When looking at the foundation for this album's sound, it's important to note how this album is an uncommon case of mechanical sounding drums working in favor for the band. When you want this space sound, you can get away with more robotic sounding percussion. Borgne doesn't use a live drummer and it would be kinda hard to reproduce the drum lines without muddling the band's sound too much. Fortunately, they don't get quite as electronic sounding as Mysticum's drum programming does; this style wouldn't fit Borgne at all. Alongside the percussion, Borgne use a good pairing rhythm and lead guitar to create this bleak sounding melody with a ghostly sounding keyboard to top it all off.

Borgne play industrial black metal with a rather misanthropic atmosphere to it. It's very spacey sounding but lyrically they don't touch on the subject of space. Instead, Borgne's lyrical focus is on negative emotional themes such as fear, hate, and the sense of futility. The way this negative energy is expressed is varied as the album progresses though. Tracks like "Eonious Fovous" and "Everything is a Fallacy" are slow paced and lifeless sounding hunks of nihilistic noise while "Void Miasma" and "When Swans are Choking" are both faster paced storms of spaceship gunfire (almost literally in regards to the lyrics of the latter track). The suffocating feeling in the album's sound increases throughout this album's incredibly long eighty-eight minute duration before reaching it's critical max in its extremely oppressive fifteen minute closer "L'Odeur de la mort". If there still are space-themed death analogies to make with this band, it's not something flashy like supernovae or black holes. This atmosphere is more akin to an agonizing death by exposure to a vacuum.

Since their foundation, Borgne have only gotten stronger. Their latter two albums on Sepulchral Productions showed a major breakthrough with the band's sound and even though they've departed the label Règne des morts proves that Bornyhake has dark depths that he can still plunge into.