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Nadja > Belles bêtes > Reviews > caspian
Nadja - Belles bêtes

Belle has testes - 80%

caspian, March 9th, 2010

It's all been pretty uneven with Nadja the last two or so years; a few real good 'uns aside most of the time's been spent on doing bad splits with worse bands and well meaning but ultimately failed experiments. "Belles Betes" wasn't really a return to form, but it's definitely a good Nadja release. Those looking for something different from Quiet Stoner Man and and his Librarian sidekick will be disappointed, but the sound isn't yet broken so I'm not too bummed.

There's no way of telling that this is actually a CD full of Aidan Baker's solo stuff reworked, but that's hardly surprising considering Baker's solo stuff is generally Nadja with less distortion, and thus by adding more distortion it will sound like Nadja. Exactly like, really. The guitar tone is fuzzy and blown out to the point of incoherence, the drums suck but are ignored easily enough, the vocals do that really quiet droney thing - I like Aidan's vocals, but I wish he'd do something a bit different, like use more then his typical few notes. Anyway, all in all it's that really immersive noise 'n' guitars set up here that's on basically every other Nadja album. Needless to say, as it's a remake of a bunch of ambient tunes there's not really a lot of metal here, at all, but again that's not surprising if you've followed Nadja to date (by my count, there's maybe 1 inarguably metal album, 2 borderline, and a lot that only share very superficial similarities with it).

Overall, this is hardly essential but a pretty good release. Nadja cranks a lot of them out, though. It's not the Touched remake, it's not Thaumogenesis, and it's not Truth Becomes Death. Like most of the more obscure Nadja cuts this is generally a release solely for the Aidan and Broadrick slash fanfic writers, but it's not a bad release by any means. Shame there's nothing from "Sea Swells a Bit" though, as that album was siiiiick.