Subterraneus

Do you remember this legend about Dead, the Mayhem vocalist, saying he used to inhale the remnants of a dead raven he was keeping in a plastic bag before taking the stage?
Well, listening to Sale Freux’s “Subterraneus” is basically the musical equivalent of breathing a putrid raven corpse buried in some unholy ground for weeks. I can’t honestly think of a better description.

Like any other musical genres struck by mainstream recognition, black metal has drifted far, far away from its original essence and I’m always grateful to bands who keep the flame of the old days alive. As long as they do it with style. And like any of these bands (there are actually not so many but all are mentioned in this blog), Sale Freux has invented nothing (who has anyway?) and owes a lot to “Transylvanian Hunger” or any other Norwegian cornerstone of the early 90’s, but Sale Freux has digested for a long time enough of the teachings of the elders to regurgitate them with its own pestilential breath. Yes, pestilential it is - this album reeks of death, madness, and a strange morbid beauty.

Black metal is all about the atmosphere, all about the grimness. It is about black & white out of focus, non-glossy photoshopped pictures with shiny 20 inches spikes purchased on Ebay. It is about capturing the invisible and the unseen and not writing overproduced songs with bombastic arrangements on pro-tools and fucking triggered drums. It is about a music reaching the inner depths of your soul, not a collection of catchy hooks for drunken teenagers in the mosh pit. And fuck all those metalhead crowds and fuck Watain too. BM is clandestine, vile, stinky, and fucking raw. Sturm Und Drang. Sale Freux (Bloody Rook in French) embraces all of the above.

The band plays a cavernous (in the sense that it sounds like it was recorded in a cave, could be a swamp too) music echoing the rural French folklore from long forgotten days. But these echoes are more conceptual than musical, so no stupid pagan metal crap here. Again, it’s all about the atmosphere. If you have ever wandered in some old forest somewhere in the rural parts of France, Sale Freux's music will be even more appealing to you as the band captures perfectly this melancholic, mysterious, and haunting mood you can feel in these places as long as you have a little imagination and propensity to tragedy (Dionysus).

“Subterraneus” is a menacing black-metal storm with ravenous melodies, the epic odyssey of a lost soul screaming along with the witches, the ravens, and the sick, cursing mankind celebrating the wicked. There’s some desperate romanticism to it, almost like a pale Baudelairean sun glowing throughout the record.

All lyrics are in French, fitting perfectly with the music. I can’t really tell more about this, but there’s a certain poetry to it with the use of old-fashioned French, something a little similar to Darvulia's syntax, although the music and the concept is radically different. The production is top-notch, slightly better than on their previous demo, but not too polished with some interesting acoustic overdubs and other nature sounds in the tradition of grim forest black metal which kinda reminds me of the first Arckanum album without these ridiculous pipes. All in all, “Subterreanus” embodies perfectly my vision of black metal.

The band is born from the ashes of Saatkrähe, although its progenitor, Dunkel is already quite a figure in the underground black metal scene since he’s also behind the bands Drakonhail (which I totally worship), Voqkrre, and Breizh Occult. Subterraneus is their first full length and the tape is available now on +Selbstmord Kommando Produktionen+ in very limited copies. This is a masterpiece. Don’t fucking miss it.