Lure of Ephemeral Beauty

French trio Eclectika return with their third full length album of so-called experimental post-black metal, entitled “The Lure of Ephemeral Beauty”. Attempting to describe this album is quite a challenge, because it’s not really all over the place, it’s not really adventurous and it’s not really like anything else I’ve ever listened to before. Operatic vocals plus black metal vocals plus boring, uninspired black metal music does not make for an awesome listening experience.

After a movie score styled intro, the band delves into almost an hour of relative weirdness. It’s not really an avant-garde, weird for the sake of being different weirdness, but rather a disjointed, cram whatever the hell will fit into one package type. There’s a little bit of everything going on here, with the base of the music being double bass runs and warbly trem guitars, you know, standard black metal stuff. The riffs are relatively simplistic and offer little variety throughout the entirety. Rather than the guitars changing tempos and structure, Eclectika offer running bass lines that hang above the other instrumentation. These bass lines, although prominent, are not technical, rather they fairly simplistic fret runs that just happen to be loud in the mix. The drums plod along, with double kicks and all, but really lack any intensity. Like the simplistic guitar lines, the drums are just kind of there. The music pretty much stays the same, with trem guitars and double bass drums, aside from a few anomalies, like the overly loud string section on “Sweet Meleancholia” and some doomier, more plodding sections like on “Handicapped Sex in a Mental Orgy”. There are occasional expeditions into an almost surreal post rock feel, but they wash away back into monotony as quickly as they appear.

There are two distinct vocal styles roaming at large here, clean, operatic female vocals and shrieking, raspy black metal vocals. These vocal styles get interchanged throughout the album, with no difference in the approach to the underlying music relative to the vocal type being played. The black metal vocals are fairly standard yet monotone in delivery. They do get old after a while, especially given that the only breaks from this monotony are the operatic female vocals. The female vocals are of the operatic type, somewhere in or near the soprano range. The vocals are passable, but they lack any power whatsoever. Really the only time the instruments do anything special at all is during “Aokigahara” which is a slow building ten minute track that sounds more like prog rock than anything else. There’s a noodling lead guitar line, jazzy drums and atmospheric keys, which is actually a nice relaxing track, but it is extremely out of place.

Honestly, this is like an entire hour of uninspired, monotonous black metal with doomy passages and clean, operatic vocals. There are no hooks at all. Anywhere. There are no vocal hooks, no catchy guitar lines, no awesomely inspiring drum passages. It’s just boring music put to tape for the sake of putting music to tape. Maybe this album just feels weird because of the way the vocals and instruments fail to interact with each other on any level. It’s really sad that the best tracks are the intro and outro. It seems like there are some good ideas scattered around here, but the monotony of the music makes an entire listen of this album almost impossible. There are hundreds of other options out there if you want to listen to semi-coherent avant-garde black metal, so steer clear of this one.

Written for The Metal Observer:
http://www.metal-observer.com/