Royaume de glace

Gosh, seven years have passed since I reviewed this Canadian act's debut "Quintessence". I sure have been slow to catch onto the reality that Annatar has released two follow-up albums since then. I've heard "Royaume de Glace" - "Kingdom of Ice" in English - a few times now and it's a very grand and epic recording. Annatar has obviously worked on and polished his style and done some live performances with hired musicians and his experiences are reflected in the music. Drama and a dynamic flowing quality are present, there is a good sense of direction, individual songs are crafted very well with room for dark urban / melodic post-BM instrumental sections, and the playing sounds very confident.

The album opens with the most marvellous instrumental introduction I've heard in years: dark and sorrowful, redolent of fading grandeur and with foreboding of what's to come. The title track that follows immediately upholds the dark ambience and carries and builds on the momentum established with graceful, darkly sparkling riffs, crisp percussion and death-rattle vocals. Annatar's voice is very thin and sometimes so spidery that it can be inaudible beneath the two sets of guitars (BM and acoustic) on some tracks. Not that this is really a major problem as the music is highly melodic and flows beautifully from BM to dark acoustic and back but sometimes the pain and the anguish in the singing can be missed. Moments of malevolence sometimes open up with slight changes of key or flattened notes.

As the album progresses, the mood becomes ... well, more sombre and dark: "Cold Forgotten Earth" is a heavy, near-thundering track, strong on bass-dominated rhythms and doomy beats, and revealing an unexpected near-experimental ambient middle section. "L'oeil nocturne" is a very solid effort though in spite of its strong riffs backed up soft synth tones it's a lesser track simply by comparison with much of the rest of the album. The best part of the song is its instrumental coda, filled with despair and deep pain. "La nuit", the second of two tracks to feature French-language lyrics, is an emotionally intense song with majestic riffing and a complex, contradictory nature from the combination of piano, noisy BM guitars, acoustic strings, an interesting use of synths to produce an orchestral horn section effect and powerfully doomy percussion.

Each track has its distinct musical identity and seems to improve on the previous song. I daresay that if they had been arranged differently or even back to front so that the intro becomes the outro and the title track the second-last song, I'd still be saying the same thing about them all!

There's not much to fault here though personally I'd prefer the vocals to be more upfront in the final mix and more varied in delivery: some clean vocals and/or spoken word lyrics would help, maybe even duelling voices with a second vocalist. The singing is quite thin in a number of songs because the music is often powerful with dramatic and stirring riffs and melodies. Also at this point I would query the need to sing in both English and French: Annatar should sing in whichever language he feels more comfortable and which offers him the better opportunity to express emotion to its full.

Apart from these minor points, the album is a tremendous leap forward in this act's evolution. I'm wondering how the third album will shape up after this second one - "Royaume de Glace" is sure to be a hard act to beat.