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7.5
- Band:
Le Bâtands du Roi - Duration: 00:47:00
- Available from: 10/10/2025
- Label:
-
Les ACTeurs de l'Os shadow productions
Streaming not yet available
“I didn't kill Umberto. I killed the king. I killed a principle.”
For Gaetano Bresci, shooting Umberto I of Savoy was equivalent to shooting a world model. In the intentions of the Tuscan anarchist, the attack on the monarch was an extreme form of political acting, a radical way of accelerating a social transformation and arousing a reaction in the consciences of the oppressed. It is a conception daughter of the French revolution, before which to kill a king was not only a political act: it was an assault on divine order.
Although several medieval and modern intellectuals had supported its legitimacy in cases of specific, for official culture the regicide represented, at the time, the worst of betrayals. Kill the king – king by grace of God – It meant by removing a man that Providence had commissioned to counter chaos on earth, giving him the monopoly on violence.
The regicida, as well as a criminal, was therefore an sabumer of peace, a subverter of balance and an enemy of the people, whose inevitable death sentence was transformed into a ritual imbued with brutal symbolism.
There is therefore a certain conceptual density behind the pseudonym 'regicide', chosen by the young founder of the Orleanesi Le Bâtands du Roi, and in the decision to place the vicissitudes of two regicidi brothers at the center of their second album.
“Le Chemins de l'Oexil” comes out for Les Acteurs de l'Ifro, a label that has always been quite sensitive to the French tradition of the Medieval Black. Entering a roster that boasts historical groups such as Darkenhöld and Aorlhac was certainly a nice blow for the Bâtands, who have been around since 2022 and that only last year they published for the most modest noire.
On the other hand, the proposal of the Le Bâtands du Roi is well aligned with the medieval black metal that likes in the thieving: very melodic, very 'engaging' and a tamarro little screen, a maximalist in the approach and rather emphatic in tones. Just like the solemn and ambitious concept with which the trio presents itself to the delicate test of the second full-length, describable as the thing closest to an epic/power disk that a black group can give birth.
The test? Suffice it to listen to the “Forêt” Open, in which the influence of the Blind Guardian is metabolized through Emperor and Seth, or the remarkable “Le Chevalier Au Corbeau”, with its clean riterall and the pressing guitars, rich and vaguely martial.
The search for the bombastic riff, the high -sounding vocal lines, the space reserved for solos and muscle production give “Le Chemins” a sort of 'double soul', which holds two different worlds together, but far from irreconcilable. The Bâtards succeed in the company by playing the card of titanism well, but also thanks to some more or less successful expedient: some predictable recitative (“The âme sans reposi”), a much less predictable Ballad (“Le Val Dorman”), the unavoidable introduction of organ (“The Chevauchée Cadavérique”).
It is difficult to evaluate the music of Victor Hugo's music in “Exil” in “Vers L'étoile solitaire”: the operation is original and musically successful, but it is not clear what a nineteenth -century giant has to do with a medieval album – especially if it is not called into question for its famous medieval setting novel. Probably the link is the theme of exile, but the feeling of an intellectual harassment a little out of focus remains which, unfortunately, joins other uncertainties in the development of the concept.
Net of these details and of a still a little impersonal sound, however, the disc holds well until the end, with songs such as “Ord Vil Merdos” (which at least in the intentions almost seems to wink at the “dance of death” of the Maiden) and the solid, tight title-track.
On a technical level, therefore, “Le Chemins de l'Oexil” is a well-built, fresh and inspired album, thanks to a decisive and pardoned songwriting by moments of pure entertainment that will joyfully make those who prefer the most melodic black metal and 'hi-fi'. But it is also a fairly tacky album, aesthetically kitsch, full of narrative ambitions that are not fully fulfilled. Loving it or not is just a matter of taste.
Daniel D`Amico for SANREMO.FM
