le secret | Through the Shattered Lens

You would be hard-pressed to find an album which more reviews have simultaneously labeled generic and beautiful than Les Voyages De L’Âme. It’s an odd situation. Neige has definitely found his sound. I have to imagine that he personally is more satisfied with his work now than ever. The catch is that a lot of people appreciated his music best when he was still searching for something. Les Voyages De L’Âme is beautiful, no doubt about it. It’s a journey through a mysterious, fanciful world that I have taken for 50 minutes frequently this year; it was released in early January, so it’s technically a year old at this point.

Là Où Naissent Les Couleurs Nouvelles

But such descriptions cannot characterize all of his works. Neige’s music has a bit of a narrative in it, told not so much in a single album as in the scope of his career. His first release, Tristesse Hivernale (2001), was a poorly produced sinister ride not particularly unlike the debuts of the Norwegian legends. It also happened to feature an early appearance by Famine, whose Peste Noire took a drastically different and equally admirable path in the years to follow.

Neige didn’t release an Alcest follow-up until 2005, but “Le Secret” revolutionized metal. The two-track EP was an odd consequence of Neige continuing to play black metal while aspiring towards the atmospheric polar opposite. What you got was something beautiful but perpetually fragile; a glimpse at something angelic in music’s darkest corner, which threatened to fade away at any given moment. It’s the sense that what you’re hearing reveals itself in temporary, fleeting form that really places Le Secret above the rest of Neige’s work for me.

Neige was openly bothered by the reviews Le Secret received. A lot of people just didn’t get it, or more likely did get it but felt some bone-headed sense of masculinity in jeopardy should they admit to getting it. Neige regarded the album as a failure. I think the failure was on the part of the listeners who reviewed it, and I was borderline devastated when Neige re-recorded Le Secret last year. But in any case, the fleeting nature of Le Secret’s sound reflected a real fleeting feature of Neige’s style: It wasn’t what he was ultimately aiming for. It was, rather, the last step on the way to getting there. Souvenirs d’un autre monde was the full realization. We might for stylistic purposes label it shoegaze black metal, but it was really post-black metal in the most literal sense.

Souvenirs d’un autre monde was, to me, all about the triumph. It reached for that light buried within Le Secret and made it through to the other side. Neige’s music finally entered that fanciful world of light and beauty that he had envisioned all along. If Le Secret was all about getting there and Souvenirs d’un autre monde was the overwhelming awe he felt when he reached it, Écailles de Lune might be understood as a more orchestrated exploration of what waited on the other side.

Faiseurs De Mondes

This might seem a very peculiar and abstract way to go about describing a discography, but I think it reveals the reason why Les Voyages De L’Âme feels in some sense generic or repetitive. I don’t think Neige planned out any sort of progression from Tristesse Hivernale through to Écailles de Lune. Rather, he is one of those truly great musicians capable of effectively recreating his thoughts in music, and as Neige the man/musician developed his vision over time, his music progressed to reflect it. In the two years that separate Écailles de Lune from Les Voyages De L’Âme not much appears to have changed, and what Les Voyages De L’Âme lacks has absolutely nothing to do with quality. The music is superb. It’s just that we have come over the years to expect perpetual transition, and Les Voyages De L’Âme instead continues to explore the other-worldly landscape Neige first fully entered on Souvenirs d’un autre monde. Les Voyages De L’Âme is in every way Écailles de Lune Part 2.

Given Neige’s past responses to criticism, who knows how he might react to the labels of “generic” being pasted on Les Voyages De L’Âme in otherwise positive reviews. I think the aspect of his sound that is being criticized in this regard isn’t really something he can help, and anyway the context in which the album may be called “generic” is a major stretch from the normal sense of the word. Better to say that it is a continuation of Écailles de Lune, and outstanding as such.

If there are any further doubts, I should inform you that Sophie loved it. She has impeccable taste.

Two months ago I thought I could actually finish reviewing every album I wanted to before it came time for the year-end lists. Then I got hooked on Diotima by Krallice again, bought Skyrim, and had finals. (Yes, I will be a student until I’m pushing 40 at this rate.) So much for writing the rest of the reviews I’d intended to. But there remains one band that’s just too loud to pass up, and I am not necessarily referring to their music.

Returner

In certain ways, Aesthethica is the triumphal conclusion to a seed I first noticed begin to sprout on Ulver’s Nattens madrigal, recorded back in 1996. Hymn VI: Of Wolf and Passion accomplished something completely unprecedented in the history of black metal up to that time. The song began with a frightfully fleeting glimpse at something beautiful; it wasn’t an “introduction” to the song, prefixed for the purpose of defilement. No, it was an ecstatic jubilation shouting out from the depths, proclaiming a profound sublimity hidden beneath this shroud of loathsome chaos. Almost a decade later, in 2005, Neige found himself transfixed upon a fleeting vision of a word of pure light and recorded Le Secret. This is, roughly, a description he himself has used in attempting to articulate his muse. Feeling that the original recording failed to capture this, he recently released a new version of the EP. It, like Souvenirs d’un autre monde and more so Écailles de Lune, has a tendency to overemphasize the aural light, with angelic vocals and an uplifting shoegaze fuzz drowning out the cold death of traditional black metal. He has turned to what you might regard as stereotypical representations of purity in order to recreate his vision.

But this sense of something whole and eternal falls on deaf ears. To me it is merely pretty, never spiritual, because it fails to capture what made the original Le Secret so profound. There, the black metal never made amends. It was an ever present, undeniable force, fulfilling its original purpose and not merely conforming to a new creative whim. The beauty rested within it, perpetually fleeting, not beyond it and eternal. Neige was never aware of his own masterpiece. Perhaps that sort of innocence is what made it possible in the first place. I applaud him for seeing through his own vision to completion and not settling for mine, but the future of Alcest is of no further relevance to the musical progression I have been anticipating these past few years.

For that I turn to Liturgy. On Aesthethica we hear one of the first conscious recognitions of that seed I detected in Ulver, which has been slowly blossoming in the darkness ever since.

Harmonia

In case the video to Returner did not suffice, Liturgy’s frontman, Hunter Hunt-Hendrix, made a complete fool of himself in an interview last year while attempting to explain the philosophy behind his music. I will make no apologies here; he deserves every ounce of ridicule he’s received from it. At one point he suggested that fans read his ‘manifesto’, which is free to download, and I did. It is crammed to the hilt with pomp and self-righteousness, amidst which the following constitutes, I believe, his main idea: He describes metal as a pursuit of maximum intensity. The closer music evolves towards that end, the more apparent it becomes that “totality is indistinguishable from nothingness” (Hideous Gnosis: Black Metal Theory Symposium I, 57). Black metal long embraced nihilism as the ultimate end, but nihilism is a hollow reward. The true apex of humanity lies in the penultimate, one step from the void, reveling in the finite.

What I find interesting here is not what he’s saying (well, I do find it interesting, but I’ll keep those thoughts to myself), but rather the fact that paradigms are beginning to emerge which attempt to define the sensation I expressed in terms of my experiences with Ulver and Alcest. I call Aesthethica a triumphal conclusion because it is the first thoroughly self-conscious result of a musical trend I’ve been following for quite some time now–triumphal because, well, it’s pretty damn good. It marks the end of an evolutionary process, from which a new cycle will begin. Transcendental black metal is going to happen whether we like it or not, and in the process we will witness a very peculiar clash of values. I mean, just look at these guys:

High Gold

Aesthethica isn’t always this good. Some tracks bore me to tears. It’s in their intense moments that Liturgy really shine, and while these comprise the bulk of the album, the band seems to have little else to offer. Generation is a rhythmic plod which dreams of being post-metal but feels more like my cd is skipping. Glass Earth is a vocal chant that inspires only laughter; it sounds like something off a really bad indie rock album, and this amidst a genre as intimately connected to folk as metal. The intentional 60 seconds of silence at the end of Sun of Light is annoying, though forgivable in the wake of the album’s best track; but the three minute doodle filler track that follows seems to serve no purpose whatsoever.

Its finest moments though, such as High Gold, are amazing. I can’t say that the album is great, because it’s so inconsistent, but I will acknowledge that it contains some of the best songs written this year, and moreover, it is unique in what it attempts to accomplish. Perhaps a lot more could be said on its behalf had Hunter Hunt-Hendrix declined all interviews and published no ‘manifesto’, but I’m kind of glad he did what he did. It confirmed a message which I’ve been preaching for years now; not, that is, his precise philosophy, but at least a feeling. There has been something entirely positive and uplifting lurking out there in the black metal scene for a very long time. Liturgy are the first band I know of to not merely incorporate it but embrace it as the fundamental focus of their entire sound. Other bands have occasioned to evoke it in passing more effectively (Krallice for instance), or have consistently approximated it without ever fully cashing in (post-Le Secret Alcest and associated acts), but Liturgy provide me with something solid to point at and say unequivocally that is what I was talking about.