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.

Could Love Lies Bleeding be considered veterans of the black metal industry despite their isolation from the main bands who have led the genre into the 21st century by the throat? Rhetoric is always a good device to use no matter what you’re writing however, there are times when rhetoric can cause severe problems with the mind. For instance, this band, Love Lies Bleeding, are back with their second opus, ‘S.I.N’ and it provides more questions than answers in response to the ailing metal fan who wants to know precisely where and why this band are headed in the direction that they are. For all their positive traits, Love Lies Bleeding like to annoy and confuse when it comes to the direction of the band. This record presses on where the first left off, but considering it was just above average, bordering on good, one wonders why significant alterations weren’t made to make a heavy impact upon the listener and the music itself. Limbo is a place where many metal bands can often become entangled in and find it hard to escape from. ‘S.I.N’ isn’t terrible by any stretch of the imagination, it just lacks a significant spark and symbolises the French bands attempt to incorporate female vocals and keyboards as an easy way out of being truly innovative. French black metal is often regarded as a stand out scene, but this record doesn’t showcase why.

Whilst this style may have caught the attention on the first record, it can only go so far in its exploration of themes. This record, to me, symbolises the bands status in limbo, swirling around the sufficient number of acts who’re entwined in this capsule where bands struggle to get out of. An extreme move away from the previous sound results in cries of ‘sell-out’ and more of the same results in cries of frustration and perhaps anger. Love Lies Bleeding like to frustrate their audience with formulated drums, which don’t add much significance to the soundscapes unless the pace is slowed down from the usual fast tempo, which is sparsely the case throughout the songs. When songs like ‘Frygt Og Baeven’ are challenged to produce moments of melancholic bliss, they produce them when the songs are slowed down due to a higher increase in intensity from the keyboards, which take up a piano like sound and good use of symphonies. The problem is, this is rarely the case. Often, the slow coursing symphonic structures are blended together with unsubtle tremolo guitar riffs or double bass and it isn’t as impacting as it was previously. Songs like ‘Bringer Of Redemption’ signify Love Lies Bleeding’s move towards a traditional black metal style and a stereotypical French style, whereby the ‘raw’ sub-genre may take hold for sustained moments at a time. At least the production is well suited to the style, though it outshines the bass, which is lacking in substance anyway. Instead of being the shepherd, the bass acts as the sheep, following the guitars every move.

These moments of madness neglect the bass, deem the vocals redundant and unemployed and whilst there isn’t anything immediately wrong, the result is an endless wave of mediocrity that other black metal acts can produce in a better fashion, catering to the audiences needs better and much more communicative. The rasps, the rather inaudible bass and the symphonic structures seem out of place amongst the harsher elements, though there will be those who enjoy the inclusion of piano sections, which apparently spruce up the soundscapes and makes them sound more significant than they actually are. Whereas the first record seems decent enough in its approach, change was needed and it hasn’t come. Instead of exploring the style they had initially set down, the band has covered over the grey spots with florescent colours in a vain attempt to portray meaning when instead all that exists is the invisible. Lacking in depth, emotion and diversity, the inclusion of operatic female vocals (which are just melodic chants, no actual singing for long parts and when singing does come into play, the lyrics are as indecipherable as the rasps!) add no greatened sense of anything in particular apart from a giant cup of what the fuck is that doing there! Some of the songs are also too long. They need to be rewritten, restructured and scaled down to a manageable size whereby the accessibility level is actually existent, not hidden behind a brick shit house. Not as lively as the first, nor as good.