The Oubliette

An album from Vixenta is a rare event: in 14 years since the band formed (in 2010), Vixenta has issued just three albums with "The Oubliette" being the most recent. Not just any oubliette but this Oubliette as imagined by Vixenta is a literal black hole whose walls stretch indefinitely and contain the souls of those unfortunate enough to enter its maw. These trapped souls cry for deliverance from the pain and torment of their imprisonment, and some of these dare to hope that they can and will escape this realm of non-existence. The album becomes an exploration into the depths of human despair and hopelessness, and holds out hope that such bleakness can be overcome. Along the way "The Oubliette" also skewers those individuals and institutions that trap and enslave humans, and which would deny people freedom, self-expression and self-determination.

The music may be raw, harsh and cutting with occasional passages of streamlined beauty in which the roughness and savagery of the guitars contrasts with the pure tones of piano and acoustic classical guitar in some passages. The riffs and rhythms may be steeped in melodic second-wave black metal but there also appear influences from classical guitar music and folk in some tracks, especially early tracks like "Majestic Bloodstained Nightmare" and the first of the two "Blood on the Idol" songs. At this point in the album, the speed and ferocity of the music, and the slavering, bloodcurdling menace of the rasping vocals are the most impressive aspects of the songs, with the slower, more intensely melancholy and folk-oriented sections being all too brief.

It's only when we come to track 4 "Mountains Fall" that the album really starts to open up with intensely emotional and dramatic music, harsh in tone and filled with pain. The musicians allow themselves to be carried away by the emotion of the song such that they become conduits for whatever spirits trapped in this part of The Oubliette pour out. This leads into the album's second pair of connected tracks "Downfall" and "Demise" – these are not very long but they are epic multi-layered pieces in their own right, with crunchy and rugged tremolo guitar riffs, dissonant jangle guitar, occasional post-BM lead guitar howl, thundering drums and threads of piano melody throughout. The distorted ghost howls have to compete with this barrage of music and (to my amazement) they are clear enough that they counterbalance any tendency for the music to fall into bombast.

No sooner do we leave behind "Downfall" and "Demise" than we plunge into the next pair of songs "Into the Oubliette" and "Escape from the Oubliette", the most post-BM / symphonic BM tracks of the album in their sound and melodies. There is a histrionic quality in the singing and general music delivery, and for their lengths (neither song is very long; both last a total of eight minutes) they can be highly theatrical in a Grand Guignol way. After these two songs, the album goes on a long denouement with "Weeping Plains", in its own right a good mix of atmo-BM / symphonic / post-BM with some prog-rock experimentation but a bit lost on an album already bursting with epic musical theatre mixing those genres. Closing track "Faint Whispers", featuring guest musician Liam D Wright / Rêvasseur on vocals (and who also contributed lyrics), is a headbanging rock-out song with catchy tunes and folk-flecked rhythms of the kind that probably could have appeared on earlier tracks to give them a bit more individuality and distinctiveness.

There is so much packed onto this album, with the essential atmospheric / post-BM style evolving from a straightforward and elegant music with classical guitar / folk guitar elements into a more emotionally intense and melodramatic creature veering towards excessive theatrics and not always sounding convincing in its histrionics. The brooding blackened folk passages really are too brief on an album that really needs them to help emphasise its themes of hopelessness, despair and eventual determination and resilience. One thing especially that is missing on most of "The Oubliette" at least until the last song is distinctive riffing on most tracks that would set them apart as individual songs in their own right.

Featuring as it does three sets of paired songs, the album could have been broken up into separate EPs or even three mini-albums in a trilogy, each with its own distinct style of music and each reflecting an aspect of the concept of a complex multi-dimensional prison that traps humans physically, spiritually and psychologically. As it is, "The Oubliette" does come across as being overcrowded with ideas and varied music that perhaps need more space to breathe and develop into truly memorable works with distinctive and idiosyncratic riffing and rhythms. Once the Vixenta musicians can iron out these wrinkles, there will be no stopping them in becoming a major force for good in the universe.