Solarité

The "Solarité" album can be presented as a perfect specimen of classic French black metal: a fast tempo, melodic riffs, the avoidance of sharp and brutal passages, the considered harmonious structure (thanks to it, the completeness of the compositions isn't violated, when the chords change abruptly), and of course, the vocals in French. The French language is "soft" here, it doesn't grate on ears, as, for example, in most avant-garde / experimental projects from France (well, you have no idea how annoying it is sometimes in metal genre). The vocalist, as befits French black metal (a very emotional genre, I must note), shouts his lyrics desperately, but without "hysterical" notes.

By the way, the only song in which I detected notorious "French avant-garde black metal" is the fifth one – the instrumental entitled "The Orb of the World". This composition is founded on a melodic acoustic-guitar fingering, but the lead guitar part is somewhat avant-garde, in the sense that it is unusual for the album's atmosphere. Well, this unusualness is created by the use of guitar effects too. However, the fingering in the second half of the track already sounds like Pink Floyd. What a pleasant composition.

Almost all the guitar parts from the "Solarité" album are based on a tremolo picking and guitar fingering. A hall reverb (I guess) is often used for the lead guitar, as a result the guitar parts are even more penetrant, as it should be for this kind of music, – the most striking example is the sixth song "Under the Aegis of Eros". The final solo in this composition is stretched marvelously, it works very well for the impact of the whole song. It should be noted, that the piercing solo in the finale is perhaps another hallmark of "Solarité". In some cases, these parts are too short (for example, in the first "Aurora" and the second "Ferments of Corruption"), but sometimes the ending comes out too melodic, as it's said, "tearjerker", – here I'll give as an example the third "Hero Worship".

To sum up, out of touch with "French", "Solarité" for me is melodic black metal, which, perhaps, can even be called epic. Melody dominates the album and – ruthlessly! – crushes all other components of the music and structure. For example, the main riff of the first song is, in fact, in the vein of Gorgoroth, but due to the melody it is difficult to identify this Norwegian band. Gorgoroth could be discerned in the second song too, but it is well camouflaged here by a lyrical guitar fingering, the same in the third song in the second half.

Not only "Gorgoroth" turned out to be ground by ruthless melody. In the second song from 4:44, at the beginning of the third song and in the same song from 2:52, the rhythm guitar plays the "thrash metal" riffs, but the net effect in each case is that thrash metal is buried by / in a melodic part of the lead guitar. I don't argue that Nécropole contrived this manner, but they (or rather, he) performed it quite originally.

Thrash metal is nullified by the lead guitar again in the fourth song, "The Way Is the Virtue", and the second "thrash metal" episode (from 7:45, at a leisurely pace) turns here into one hundred percent epic black metal. At the same time, this song seems to me the most "French" (in the sense that I meant above). It's a kind of melodic vortex. Ah, it's like a beauty that does not tolerate anything except itself, so it brings everything to heel. Nevertheless, this is the best song on the album.