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bleerrrgghhh - 29%
How do bands like these get pro CD releases? I mean, really, how?
Sombre Chemin:
What this honestly sounds like is a vaguely more competent and 'normal' spin on Zarach 'Baal' Tharagh, but without that project's deviant charm. Almost wholly random, dissonant tremolo riffing grinds against a questionable drum performance and a pretty awful standard of sound quality while the vocalist shrieks over the top like his arm just got blown off by an IED. The song structures are mostly random, changing spastically from clumsy thrash beat to slow, somewhat melodic, pseudo-depressive black whenever the band feels like it. This would sound improvised if the weirdness wasn't so clearly practiced (if not quite practiced enough for the instrumentation to be good). While this sounds weird, it's still pretty uninspired; most of these dissonant riffs sound like the sort of thing I'd hear from blackmetal.com or Wraith Productions but with half the professionalism and twice the derivation from other, better bands.
The one interesting moment on this side is closing track 'Possession Odinique', essentially an alt rock track which brings to mind Judas Iscariot experiments like 'From Hateful Visions'; it actually has personality that the abstract combination of Absonus Noctis and a handful of random French suicidal bands does not. Sombre Chemin pretty much sucks; if you just want to hear ultra-primitive, dissonant, random black metal, there's other, better known instances of the style that are much more widely known (and hated) but are also ultimately more interesting. This is in a no-man's land between attempting to be professional and pure basement-dwelling madness, and it's not a comfortable place at all for it.
Ornaments Of Sin:
What the hell do I even say about this? It's a slightly more professional spin on Sombre Chemin: dissonant French black metal (more oldschool than Deathspell Omega but with some similarly annoying traits) that is entirely uninspired as well as not even being delivered very well for what it is. Sure, the song structures make more sense than the first band on this split, but there's no real sense of development or motion to the songs and all it does is rip off, well, every other black metal band from the past decade. You have Swedish riffs, French riffs, Norwegian riffs, all sorts of boring riffs that never go anywhere or provide any atmosphere. The production and playing are better than Sombre Chemin, but Ornaments Of Sin don't even have a bizarre rock song at the end of their material to help salvage it.
There's just absolutely nothing here that would interest the underground black metal fan; I guess it's an accurate cross-section of what modern underground black metal sounds like, except for the fact that it sucks worse than normal. Nothing about this is creative or even remotely inspired; it truly feels like the band sat down to write some black metal and just recorded it for the hell of it. There's no passion or motivation behind it; this music just sinks and sinks into its own self-indulgence.
Conclusion:
Remind me exactly who the fuck listens to stuff like this?
