Cepheide - Les échappées (2021)

I was somewhat impressed with the 19+ minute opus "Lucide" that I had heard off Cepheide's split with Time Lurker a couple years ago, but even that would not prepare me for the instantly transformative material that comprises this sophomore full-length Les échappées. The product of just one musician (Gaetan), this is one of the darker, denser and arguably more cluttered approaches I've heard towards the atmospheric (or I dare say 'blackgaze'-adjacent) end of the black metal medium, but it's also lush, captivating escapism which showers the listener in shades of cold, warmth, unnerving hostility and melodic beauty. Essentially you are taking those bedrock elements of post-black and then throttling them with a dimmer, more aggressive style chocked with blast beats, guitars that are both consonant and dissonant as they stream atmospheres across the oblique nightscape of this musician's imagination.

I also loved how the vocals were implemented, they are quite frightening...perhaps if you were to focus in on them they'd be your typical sorts of rasps or grunts for the genre, but the way Gaetan just floats them against the mix so that they almost hover in the backdrop creates the impression of traverse through a tortured asylum where the inmates' manic emotions are being splattered all over the walls. This can certainly become a claustrophobic experience, but at the same time the material is rooted well enough into the traditional BM style that you have an out once those tremolo picked guitars and chords rocket right into the vaulted ceiling of the recording. I realize some might find the work a bit noisier than it needs to be, a trifle calamitous, but it all meshes together so well into this tortured, formidable expression that hits my ears like a wall of sorrows and shadows. It does have a few segues here or there where the haunting and cloying savagery cedes to something sparser and simpler, but it's all leading towards the next beautiful rush.

In a world so obsessed with bands like a Deafheaven or Wolves in the Throne Room, it would nice to see some of these more fringe acts like Cepheide get more attention, because frankly the escapism I feel here exceeds a lot of such better-known acts while never carrying that same burden of sounding trendy or inauthentic. Les échappées is a pretty wonderful freak-out of an album, and while a few areas might get a little samey, he's always throwing a few surprises in there, like the percussion and warped surfy space guitars in "L'Ivresse", to remind us of just how wide a net he's able to cast with his ideas. A very cool project that is worth hearing and worth following into the future.

Verdict: Win [8.5/10]

https://cepheide.bandcamp.com/

Time Lurker/Cepheide - Lucide (2019)

I was first exposed to Time Lurker just a couple years ago through their eponymous debut album, a fine entry into the field of black metal atmospherics and yet another band of quality populating the French landscape. Here they've teamed up with countrymen Cepheide, who I had not heard, but have a few prior recordings under their belt, presumably of a similar style and disposition judging by what I'm hearing on this disc. There are but three tracks here, Time Lurker offering up two and then their counterparts closing out the release with a 19+ minute opus, and apart from the obvious difference in length, and to some degree the production, the two pair up rather well aesthetically, performing vistas of blasted black metal that contrast against ambient segments.

And the ambient pieces rather win the day here, because in particular for the Time Lurker tunes, I didn't find the more aggressive passages quite as memorable as those on their debut. Spacious and savage surges with monotonous drums, smothered in sustained vocal snarls that fill the firmament of the recording, but rarely do they hit strings of notes that titillate until you get well into the piece, like past the five-minute mark of "No One is Real" before it slows its pace, or the middle of "Unstable Night" when the double-bass battery collides with some uneasy picking progression and bludgeons you fully in the chest while the howling and atmospheric guitars float above. Cepheide's title track, on the other hand, is a little shinier and more compelling, the way the vocals evoke these numbing chants and howls over the ebullient soundscape bursting off beneath them. The ambient segues in this tune also help defend it against the monotony a nearly 20 minute track might invoke, and they are quite immersive, the parts of the disc in which I sank the most; but otherwise I think the writing is very much in the same mold as the Time Lurker material.

If you're familiar with these groups or this general style of black metal in which atmosphere is conjured largely through sheer force, and the blasted regions of the tracks being used as a sort of transcendent hypnosis, then Lucide is nothing really to scoff at. I simply feel that the latter half of the run time is superior to the former, and overall the guitars could be written to be a little more memorable than half to play second fiddle to the windy momentum and esoteric tortured howling that doesn't stand out too boldly from the mix. Where the album hits its calms, like the intro to the first tune or sections of "Lucide", I felt myself most drawn to it, but once this ceded to the harsher parts, the material didn't really offer up a highly rewarding counterattack. Ultimately's its got a meditative feel to it on both ends of its heaviness, and it's not really intended to go for cheap hooks or melodies, but even then I didn't find the experience as evenly engrossing as it is stylistically consistent.

Verdict: Indifference [6.75/10]

https://timelurker.bandcamp.com/
https://cepheide.bandcamp.com/