Nebula Septem

Alright seventh album, seven guys, seven songs, seven minutes each, written in the key of uh, seventh notes… Anyhow, it is a concept album that uses an interesting set of rules in it’s composition. Despite the mathematical precision suggested by the ritual it must have taken to create ‘Nebula Septem’ is distinctly organic and varietal when compared to their previous full-lengths. Though Monolithe were always highly melodic and modernized for a death/doom band that leaned towards funeral doom metal pacing, they’ve found greater impact within the guidelines provided by ‘Nebula Septem’ and it’s conceptual vision.

Monolithe’s beginnings were just as conceptual, though, with their first four albums consisting of one 50+ minute funeral doom track each. Their style was likewise guided by ethereal keyboards, progressive metal breaks, and a droning wall of enormous guitars and death metal growls. If you’re already a fan of those first four albums and their “science fiction Shape of Despair” ethos yet don’t have much interest in death/doom beyond funeral doom variations, then ‘Nebula Septem’ might not be the grandiose, long-winded meditation you’re looking for. I personally lost track of the band after the release of their ‘Monolithe Zero’ compilation in 2014 because after they’d made the same album four times in a row I wasn’t sure if they had much more to offer than slow-motion death/doom.

Now if you jumped on the Monolithe ship during the ‘Episilon Aurigae’ / ‘Zeta Reticuli’ duo of albums then you saw the change in style towards progressive death/doom metal in bursts as they picked up a great deal of speed and began to work at a pace where their ideas were given enough restrictions to fully form into distinct moments. The trouble with these two records, especially when played back to back was that many of the experiments with sludge, industrial and Doom:VS style death/doom didn’t pan out. The riffs really went nowhere and it didn’t amount to anything close to as interesting as ‘IV’.

‘Nebula Septem’ makes good on those experiments with extra layers of guitars that are in service of a central vocal presence. Though the atmospheric keyboards hover just above the mix as on ‘Zeta Reticuli’ they’re now accompanied by excellent melodic lead guitars and for the first time a dynamic drum performance that isn’t either largely programmed (as in I-IV) or soundtrack-esque in nature. My favorite track was initially the very Finnish death/doom sound of ‘Burst in the Event’ (in B, of course) that feathers itself out for the last two minutes of it’s length with an earworm of a subtle guitar hook. Those trailing moments of brilliant lead guitar offer small hooks to look forward to when listening on repeat. Likewise the very Alien Soldier intro for “Engineering the Rip” had me coming back for one more listen, an odd feeling considering the finality of previous Monolithe records to date.

If you only have time for one 7 minute track on this album: Of the seven I would highly recommend the sludgified bending grooves of “Fathom the Deep”. The song hopefully offers a look into things to come for Monolithe as the track is the death/doom version of Inquisition‘s guitar wriggling rituals transformed. ‘Nebula Septem’ is Monolithe at their most nakedly musical and it was a great relief to find that they’re even more compelling at death/doom speed. It is an excellent modern vision for the band’s sound that only gains value with each successive listen.


Attribution: http://grizzlybutts.com/2018/02/02/monolithe-nebula-septum-2018-review/

Seven minstrels. Seven tracks. Seven minutes a piece. Seven tones. Seven letters of the alphabet to start the song titles. Nebula Septem. One might ascertain that there was something unusual and 'celestial' about the structure that doom mavens Monolithe have adopted for their... seventh album (of course), but that's not the only quirk that went into this piece. Nebula is quite likely their most dynamic and musical expression in terms of how much effort went into the riff building and melodic execution, and a lot of that has to do with how they've gradually evolved away from their excessively long in the tooth roots. A quartet of 50+ minute uni-track albums gave way to more digestible, but still chunky 15-minute triads on their last pair of albums Epsilon Aurigae and Zeta Reticuli, and now they've cut even those down in half. The consistency of mathematical patterns in their output almost seems to be building some cosmic convergence, some formula that might be hidden to us all until its two late and their deathly Franco doom cracks the heavens and replaces the oxygen of our atmosphere with pure chemical despair.

In the meantime, they've written a damn fine record, which I don't have a hell of a lot to compare to; busily shifting tectonic chord patterns glazed over with immediate and often desperate harmonies, with some fundamental rhythmic variations in cuts like "Anechoic Aberration" that leave me with a prog death impression not unlike the one Dan Swanö put together for his solo album Moontower, only not so busy, nor heavily reliant on the Moog organ sounds. Here the synthesizers peel off into the atmospherics created by the guitar melodies, to give an almost aurora-like counterbalance to the drudgery below, Rémi Brochard's guttural bellows creating just the right amount of sustain to emulate what must be the ultimate 'death metal vocalist floating through space...only you can hear him' sort of ambiance, straight to your ears, splattered well on the peak of the instruments without displacing or drowning them off in the vacuum. There's a constant sense of interplanetary tension that courses through the album, which is aesthetically consistent even through the mutation of the chords and the plodding, passionate fills and beats being strewn out terrestrial-like before them. But it's not always the frightening sort...you feel like you're not only seeing celestial bodies contract and collapse, but burst into existence like bright sonorous beacons that dance off across impossible distances.

It's really interesting to me how, even though they're not always paced equally or assembled in the precise same manner, how having each track at the same length creates a cerebral uniformity. I'm sure there is some scientific term for this, but I'm simply not used to it when 99.99% of all the music I absorb is broken up into longer/shorter pieces across albums, interludes and intros and outros and all that jazz. In a way, you could look at this simply as one of their first four records if it were just divided into seven, because the material itself is unquestionably fluid in stylistic decisions and instrumentation. There are only brief segways, usually in track intros like the Tangerine Dream-esque set-ups for "Fathom the Deep" and "Gravity Flood", but even these can be relied upon to rupture into splendorous misery through the growling and power chords. If you're at all enamored with the 'cosmic' in your musical purchases, or you like doom to be accessible and multi-faceted without transplanting its slow-beating, elegaic heart, then I'd say this band has long been a must for your attentions. Nebula Septem is no exception...lavish, professional, exploratory but stable. Perhaps not exceedingly memorable when broken down into its seven constituent parts, but taken as a whole it hits 'experience' level. So check that your suit is sealed, that your water and primary oxygen tanks are filled, that your battery is at full power. All life support go. And climb aboard for a glimpse of the formidable, beautiful beyond. You won't have to keep your arms and legs in the vehicle, there's plenty of room out there to shake them around.

-autothrall
http://www.fromthedustreturned.com

Album number seven. Performed by seven musicians. Seven tracks. Each track exactly seven minutes long. I hope I’m not the only one sensing a theme here. Nebula Septem is the seventh full length album from the long running French funeral doom metal project Monolithe. The band covered the origins of mankind on their initial run of self-titled, roman numeralized albums Monolithe I though Monolithe IV, all of which were comprised of single, fifty-minute plus tracks. Rumor had it that the band was going to call it quits after they unleashed number four, but they soldiered on, releasing two spacey chunks of heavy music in the form of Epsilon Aurigae and Zeta Reticuli, both of which saw the band’s fifty minute formula shortened to three fifteen minute tracks.

While fifteen minute tracks might seem much more immediately accessible than a fifty minute opus, Nebula Septem takes things a step further with it’s seven by seven formula. The band’s last two albums finally saw the band diversifying things a bit, toying more with keyboards and moving further away from their dirge-laden adherence to funeral doom tropes in favor of a progressively leaning doom/death sound; something that is continued with this album. The band hasn’t strayed very far from the sound they’ve pushed since the beginning of their career, thundering, riff-centric doom metal that slowly devours all in its wake, it’s just that it’s delivered in a much more concise and direct manner. The opener, “Anechoic Aberration”, slowly steamrolls through with thick, dense riffing and a pulsing bass presence, yet the melodic flowing guitar leads have a life of their own. Tracks like like “Delta Scuti” showcase the band’s new reliance on keyboard passages, as the entire song is backed by wispy melodies juxtaposed with discordant notes and spacey reaching while “Engineering the Rip” showcases a more laid back, cruising the void type of vibe with eerie tendrils of sound hanging in the mist.

This album marks the debut from new vocalist/guitarist, Rémi Brochard, whose deep growls mesh nicely with the band’s subterranean crawling meets alien progginess, sounding a little more gnarled and less cavernous than most funeral doom vocalists. Though the band continues in the same vein as previous efforts, Nebula Septem does come across as the most immediately accessible work in Monolithe’s catalog: it’s not just the shorter song structures. Take the closing track with it’s electronica backbeat that builds into sweeping guitar melodies and trudging rhythms, for example. This band is just on top of the songwriting game, and the warm guitar tone alongside a thick, yet organic production job just seals the deal.

To further the band’s obsession with the number seven on this album, the tonality of each song is one of the seven notes of the western scale (A through G), which is also the starting letter of each track title (in order, of course). Thankfully, the band put just as much effort into the music as they did into the concept. This is certainly Monotlithe’s strongest material since their massive Monolithe III in 2012. It’s diverse, often otherworldly, yet it delivers a towering slab of slow moving, progressively tinged doom metal. Hands down, Nebula Septem shows a band on top of their game.

Written for The Metal Observer.