Les retranchements

In a scene that's as wild, wonderful and wacky as French black metal, new acts need to stand head, shoulders and half a torso above everyone else to get some attention, especially if they put out a full-length album rather than a demo or a mini-album EP as their first release. Silhouette, originally a solo project formed in 2019 and then expanding into a six-piece with joint male and female vocals, have taken the risky path of releasing a full album, "Les Retranchements", as their debut. Through this album, and the Silhouette project generally, the musicians involved propose to use music and its structures and components (melodies, moods, atmosphere) to develop and explore dreams and visions of the past, and of the people who might have inhabited that past and who now exist as phantoms, fragmented (and fragmenting) memories and mementoes.

Balancing between acid, sometimes biting depressive suicidal BM noise and a cleaner melodic style of music, post-BM in inspiration, led by the angelic vocals of Ondine, the one female member of Silhouette, "Les Retranchements" clearly intends to be dark and even confronting, in the gloomy vistas opened up by the harsh raging noise and the spittingly venomous BM vocal counterpart to Ondine's clean singing. Unfortunately despite the band's best efforts, much of the music on the album's major tracks like "La Première Neige" and "Au Seuil de l'Oubli" comes across as quite flat. Production here seems to be the major problem: whether the music goes into scourging-blizzard mode or becomes more atmospheric to accommodate Ondine's singing, the production is equally bleak and slightly bleached. While the desolate feel that the production strives for is necessary for the band's themes and subject matter, having it all through the music when the music itself varies quite a lot, within songs and across the album, has the effect of flattening the music into something one-dimensional. Pacing is also a problem: most tracks are slow and a bit lumbering even where faster DSBM music is present (and putting the blast-beat percussion low in the mix so it ends up muddied is no help). On top of all this, some of the vocals present a problem: Ondine hardly sounds enthusiastic about what she is singing, and there is no sense of a connection between her and the music.

Of the four major tracks, "Au Seuil de l'Oubli" is more rugged and robust than the others, with angular guitar riffs and soaring synth lines that compete with and complement the snarling BM vocals. The clean vocals are mostly relegated to the background where they are not too much of a distraction until later in the song. Apart from its post-BM bleak atmosphere and the slow pace, the song does have some decent, even very catchy and memorable riffs, and builds tension with all its instruments and the dual (and duelling) vocals. The title track makes good use of some very arch melodies and sections with blast-beat percussion and shrieking – over which Ondine glides with increasingly bland and soulless vocals. "L'Etreinte de la chute" ("The embrace of the fall") starts out as an intense and emotional song – at least until it falls into plodding mode and Ondine joins in, from which point the journey seems stuck in a place between blandness and potentially more interesting doomy post-BM desperation.

The three short dark folk / post-metal pieces making up the rest of the album are structured as opening and closing works plus a mid-album interlude, all mostly ambient in nature, and serving to immerse listeners in the Gothic soundscapes of the songs.

While Silhouette's hybrid style boasts some good tough aggression and raw sound, and the potential exists for the band to move in a more soaring epic post-BM / progressive rock direction, the band members need to consider carefully how the recording and sound production affect their music and give it (or not) the depth it needs. As it is, the album is lacking in the atmosphere it should have, probably because some elements in Silhouette's style need a cleaner and clearer sound. More varied pacing in the songs, and a better emotional connection between the two vocalists and what they are singing, are needed and could be achieved by Silhouette expanding its style even more to embrace pure acoustic folk or folk-influenced music that allows Ondine to use her full vocal range and put more of her personality into the music.

The band has a fair bit of work to do to improve its sound and reconcile its mix of contrasting elements so they all work together and enhance one another, not compete and act as distractions that end up making the music less than it should be.

The slow burn debut from this French outfit sees DSBM of a particularly melodic bent placed in a Petri dish with fragments of darkwave, post metal, and blackened doom. And if that all sounds like a clusterfuck to you then fear not, it’s simultaneously much better and worse than you imagine. Silhouette’s ‘Les Retranchements’ may flirt with boredom at one end and indulge in crass emotive displays at the other, but betwixt the two is an understated work of gentle, lyrical neofolk with a uniquely sombre character. In fact, I would go as far as to say that this album would benefit from dispensing with the metallic elements entirely, which are either forgettable or lean a little too heavily into hammed up expressions of contrived despair all too common in post metal these days.

Beneath the plodding riffs and lackadaisical melodies lies a neat darkwave album in the style of Die Verbannten Kinder Evas or Dargaard. ‘Les Retranchements’ is only half an hour long and made up of seven tracks, only four of which are full on metal numbers, with each being bookended by gentle interludes. The metal music itself presents a clear, crisp finish, richly orchestrated guitars and drums filling out the mix, all with a clear aspiration toward the cinematic. The problem with these aesthetic choices is the fact that they have been deployed to cloak unimaginative music. This kind of immersive aesthetic sheen is commonplace these days, and when applied to music of a flat or derivative flavour it becomes abundantly clear that so much window dressing cannot prop up something that isn’t there.

The metal itself is a combination of garden variety blackened doom, slow and deeply melodic black metal, and that strained yet static emotive intensity that contemporary extreme metal bands of a particular colour tend to shoot for. Gentle guitar harmonies rise up to compliment the riffs, drums attempt to work added drama into the various crescendos through energetic fills and pounding double bass work. Distorted vocals are a mix of standard black metal shrieks and the overly despairing high-end wails that cannot help but be interpreted as a contrivance in this context.

It should be emphasised, however, that none of this is entirely terrible, and certainly more listenable than many comparable offerings of recent years. The result would be an utterly unnoteworthy album if that’s all Silhouette had to offer. But sitting beneath these regrettably distracting elements are deeply haunting clean vocals, captivating downbeat folk melodies, and richly fleshed out atmospheres that all hint at a quality depressive goth or darkwave album beneath the surface. Silhouette may be cloaking their penchant for this deeply uncool genre beneath the legitimacy of modern extreme metal blandism with all its half-baked bombast, but frankly ‘Les Retranchements’ could do without this sideshow.

This becomes even more apparent when we take the intro ‘Ascension’ along with the untitled interlude and outro, which all present these gracefully drab elements free of distraction. But there are also plenty of scattered moments throughout the album as a whole, sometimes riding atop the pomp and ceremony of the guitars and screeching vocals, sometimes entirely unencumbered. And for what it’s worth, Silhouette are adept enough at composing, performing, and arranging these passages of haunted beauty that the album is worth checking out for that alone, as long as one is able to put aside the lacklustre attempts at modern extreme metal for the sake of some truly engaging hints at neofolk just beneath the surface.

originally published at Hate Meditations