Krepuskule

Krepuskule (“crépuscule” being the French for “dusk”) is a local French dark metal band you probably have never heard about. Actually, neither had I until recently some benevolent vendor slipped a sampler CD alongside my monthly dose of metal records, what finally lead me to this nice little demo. Little, indeed, as it’s only fourteen minutes long.

The sound is good – by demo standards. The drums may sound thin, but they don’t seem to have been recorded with a toy kit either. The guitar and bass can clearly be distinguished, and while the vocals are undoubtedly a bit too much mixed down, it isn’t a terrible thing as it adds to the hazy atmosphere of the release. And, last but not least, a genuine violin is used (at least on the second and third track), which is as usual worth a thousand of crappy low-price synthetic orchestrations. Listen, a violin will wind through the music like an ominous snake, while crappy orchestrations will always sound like, well, crappy orchestrations, as out-of-place as an Egyptian mummy at the Oktoberfest.

The music overall consists in slow to mid-paced so-called dark metal with a slight atmospheric touch, soft and highly melodic if you want, but devoid of any syrupy vibe or misplaced emotion. One won’t find mindblowing, insanely fast riffs here for sure; however the guitar is both undoubtedly playing the main part and avoiding the dangerous reef of predictability. Fully working as a complement to it the violin doesn’t confine itself to a backing part, but often prints its distinctive plaintive voice on the forefront, especially in the poignant six minutes long Last Tears. The absence of any keyboard must also be pointed out, except maybe for those awkward electronic sounds on the first track (though they are probably played by a guitar, but the sound isn’t sharp enough to conclude), which certainly accounts a lot for this demo sounding all but fake. Granted, the drumming is pretty generic, but the genre isn’t renowned for its whimsical drums lines, and the production doesn’t help either.

Now I’ve got nothing against female vocalists as long as they don’t pitifully try to sound like opera-wannabes; indeed here the singer (it seems like her name is Diane, why not), helped by the foggy production, exhibits the fragile, ethereal voice of a fairy, reminding a bit of Lisa Johansson from Draconian, though Krepuskule is otherwise far from the Swedish gothic/doom masters. She indeed manages to find the right tone even when only backed by the violin and an acoustic guitar, in an ensemble which manages to sound both majestic and touching even if recorded with an evidently tight budget.

The only point where I might add some reservations is the first track, ironically the one I got on the sampler mentioned in the first paragraph. While after the ten first seconds it sounds overall as strong as the following songs, the intro exhibits a very unpleasant modern sound, with out-of-place distortion in addition of those silly high-pitched electronic-sounding noises I already mentioned. I seriously wonder what the bandmembers thought while recording it, as is stands in total contradiction with the rest of the work; a clever, imaginative, surprising and, indeed, METAL work.

Highlights: Betrayal, Last Tears