Blurr Thrower - Les voûtes (2021)

If you had told me 25 years ago that black metal album covers would be simple pictures of flowers like you'd see in any home/gardening rag, I'd probably have laughed at you. But it's a testament to the genre's ability to adapt itself into new aesthetic spaces which has helped it endure for me, and once we hit the pink-scape of Sunbather or the blooming fields of Bloem, there is really no turning back, and I'm alright with this. Now, don't get me wrong, I might not be a gatekeeper or purist of the form, but I love my spikes, leather and snow-capped mountains and pines as much as the next ice-demon, yet I love following the fundamentals of the music: haunting, melancholy, desperation, extremity and evil into new environments and a band like Blurr Thrower does just that.

On disc, they're picking up right where their 2018 EP Les avatars du vide left off, with some spacious, atmospheric black metal that hinges on both the traditional and post- fields. While the four tracks here have been truncated from the sprawling lengths of that release's two cuts, you're still looking at some largely swollen pieces, two of which cap the 12-minute mark. The actual style is unsurprisingly similar, with floods of fast-paced savagery that are dominated with sustained rasping and dissonant waves of higher-pitched melodic guitars that often captivate with a sort of post-punk, nearly droning mentality, although the overall effect here is one of warm light permeating your being, and doesn't come off as particularly hostile despite the genre in which the band plays. There isn't a large degree of variation in some of the riffs, they're sort of just flitting along on the same strings and tones, and unfortunately that makes the longer tracks here like "Cachot" a bit monotonous, with only occasional breaks in the action before the surging begins again.

That most of the tracks take on a similar pacing doesn't help, but to their credit, a few of the tunes manage to out-riff the others...for example, "Germes Vermeils" is a more passionate, hooky piece than "Cachot", and the wholly ambient short tune "Fanes" is a calming and welcoming interlude that does manage to get itself grimy in the final few moments where the sinister guitars and snarl break out. The vocals through the whole album are definitely of the suicidal old Varg variety, and that won't be to the taste of all, but I think they certainly fit to the music well enough. The drums are tinny and have a nice hiss to them which also matches the guitar tone, but really this is first and foremost about those guitar streams, the screams, and the atmosphere of the spaces between them, and that's the only trick to what Blurr Thrower are putting to tape. This is a decent follow-up when I'm in the mood, and if you do appreciate ambient/black metal shifts then it holds some appeal, but I think even in this limited, airy space the French project has risen to, there is some room for more variety in the future.

Verdict: Win [7/10]

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Blurr Thrower - Les avatars du vide EP (2018)

When your first release is a two-track EP with songs clocking in at 19 and 17 minutes, respectively, you've got to have something there to entice the listener's commitment. Fortunately, while they do rely a lot on repetition to fill much of that space, Île-de-France's latest enigma Blurr Thrower has just enough of a hypnotic shadow cast through its atmospheric black metal that I was in fact addicted by about the 8-9 minute mark of "Par-Delà les Aubes", the first of these two cuts. Even more fortunate, that immersion actually paid off throughout the remainder of the recording. That's not to say the concept and riff sequences here prove unique or highly nuanced by any means, but the adherence to just those basic building blocks of melancholic black metal in their hands proves enough of an escape that I looked forward to repeated exposure to these sad, soul-tearing evocations.

Book-ended with great ambient passages, "Par-Delà les Aubes" really hooks the listener with its baleful blend of slightly distorted guitar notes and lightly swelling background feedback that are soon joined by a blast beat and other, tinny, noisy guitars and harsh, raving vocals which seem to exist at a nexus between traditional 90s atmospheric black and the more recent waves of 'blackgaze', without falling too far into either of those directions; at least not until later in the song when some really mesmeric sheens of melodic guitars pour across the listener like cold water after a nap in some dank, echoing, lonely dungeon. The second piece, "Silences", doesn't highly differentiate itself from its predecessor, even playing out around the same length, but there is just a fraction of dissonance to its intensity that keeps me glued to it. Bass passages throb ever so sparsely beneath the lattice of haunted guitar-work, and while the beats aren't all that exciting, their cold, repetitious feel certainly is a boon to the overall effect being attempted through the music.

Another positive here is that occasionally, you'll hear something emerge off in the distance or the recording, perhaps just a phantom your mind is tricking you into believing is really there, that gives the tracks a little more depth than you might have expected. Even periods where the beats disappear and you're just left with this somber wall of heavily distorted, mildly melodic picking seem greater than the sum of what's happening, and the album revels in its dreariness, never freeing you from its clutches, except perhaps the ambient finale of the first track which is subtle and beautiful. Les avatars du vide does suffer slightly from a dearth of variation, but considering it's an EP I'm more than willing to forgive that, especially since it might distract one from its very point. That said, should Blurr Thrower proceed to put out some more substantial full-length releases, a bit more dynamic range will be essential to capturing the audience's attention span. But this is for sure an effective start that makes good on such a limited set of sounds, and Les Acteurs de l'Ombre Productions continues to excel at signing and promoting such atmospheric countrymen.

Verdict: Win [7.5/10]

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