Time Lurker - Emprise (2024)

Much like Time Lurker's eponymous 2017 debut, Emprise is long on transforming atmospherics into something that smacks you straight in the face, not to say it lacks in riffing and intricacy, but these are tools used to contribute bleedingly to the material's dark, streaming vibe. Paired up with the howling, tortured vocals of Mick, which clearly follow in that Burzum vein exclusively, you've got an effort that is best experienced in full when you're seeking out something desperate and transcendent, almost like you were to filter some strain of post rock through a blasting, tremolo picking filter. I think the cover artwork selected for this couldn't be more apt, because it really just feels like your conscience is escaping your pallid corpse to realms dim and hopeless and obscure.

To be clear, there are some fairly catchy licks driving pieces like "Cavalière de feu" and "Poussière mortifère", but they both have their segues of surging spaciousness interwoven with the aggressive, forward momentum. Whether this is just hyper-riffing stretched out into the void while the drums drop out, or a dire acoustic/clean guitar intro, they've got this balance of intensity and calm almost like a yin and yang across the 34 minute runtime. One track, the titular intro, is a pure swell of ambiance with what sounds like subtle vocals and snarls shoved up against some cosmic radiance or engine-humming, and it was appreciably enigmatic and dread-inducing. But despite having a consistent conceptual feel to it, there is actually a decent level of variety to the songwriting. "Disparais, soleil" stands out for being very calm, with slower guitars that ring off into the atmosphere, ethereal female vocals hovering just on the edge of your consciousness, and some nice tribal drumming to bind it all into a trance. They also balance out the faster, cutting stuff with a lot of mid-paced or slogging moments.

The vocals are going to be an acquired taste like other bands that use them, they are very traumatic and might fool an uninitiated listener into thinking they are making some mockery of the style, but they are well implemented here and definitely give you that illusion of being stabbed somewhere out in a wintry waste until the steam rises off your leaking blood. It's not meant to be comfortable, but to convey the pain and emotion of someone lost in the esoteric pocket dimension in which this musician explores. I'm not sure I'd place this quite at the equal of the Time Lurker debut, but it's close, and there are some departments in which this exceeds it...such as emotional impact, melodic grace, and diversity. This continues to be another rich new voice to experience on the French scene with dreadful potential.

Verdict: Win [7.75/10]

https://timelurker.bandcamp.com/album/emprise

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/

Time Lurker - Time Lurker (2017)

A lot of the albums I've listened through and covered from Les Acteurs de l'Ombre Productions excel within the atmospheric fold. That's not to say that I've enjoyed them all equally, but this is an area which the label clearly has good ears for, and consistently signs and releases acts which adhered to that virtue perhaps more than serving as riff machines alone. Time Lurker, a one-man French act, is perhaps the best representative of that trait which I have yet heard from this particular stable, and the eponymous full-length debut is an effort likely to satiate a large cross-space of extreme metal listeners who fancy both the sludgier side of the black metal spectrum or its blackgaze constituents.

This is a spacious, assured album swollen with memorable moments that are created merely by the shifting of note progressions, and just slams you with walls of emotional, dramatic atmosphere that aren't the product of too many gimmicks within the instrumentation...only its presentation. The vast, painful rasped vocals serve as just another icing atop the cosmic, drifting currents manifest through the guitars alone, often just tremolo picked with a natural ebullience, or plotted out in simpler chord structures that carry the lower end, nigh-on-droning weight. It's another of those albums in which the objective might seem strictly darkness, but those lighter, pervasive, 'warmer' elements of the songwriting narrative are what provide its most catchy components. This contrast works even where the album takes an instrumental turn, as on "Reborn", which is naught but shimmering guitars hitting a crescendo that takes them straight into the evening stratosphere. Sonic override, and you can even hear little hints of New Age guru Vangelis in the backing synthesized tones near its climax!

8+ minute tracks justify their duration by having just enough of these little tectonic, riveting shifts that you never grow too tired of them...even the staggering 11+ opening piece "Rupture", which sets the stage for a lot of what occurs afterwards tonally. Note phrasings don't always themselves seem so interesting or catchy, but it's how the musician (Mick) fashions them into the greater picture which makes it so impactful, and it even seems that the deeper into the track list you go, the better the album gets...like the cathartic and twisting "No Way Out from Mankind" which cultivates a more frenetic and black metallic presence but still segues into these tremolo picked, careening passages that help accent the thundering percussion beneath. Time Lurker might be a disc that requires a few spins to appreciate, since it's not gunning with genius riffs nor is it distinctly original, but once you mold yourself to its peaks, valleys, contours, it's a trip that becomes well worth taking repeatedly.

Verdict: Win [8/10]

https://www.facebook.com/timelurker/