SORDIDE – Ainsi Finit Le Jour

vote
6.5

• Bands:
  SORDID
• Duration: 00:53:37
• Available from: 10/25/2024
• Label:

• Les Acteurs De L'Ombre Productions

Five albums in eleven years of activity indicate a certain prolificacy (as well as a certain urgency) on the part of Sordide, who seem to only need a couple of years each time to assemble the musical material to include in their full-lengths. Furthermore, comparing the past discography with the very recent “Ainsi Finit Le Jour”, one clearly perceives how the band has now found a rather effective modus operandi, varying from time to time a few elements around a basic post black metal formula on which it rests the entire artistic and aesthetic conception of the French combo.
In fact, the newcomer is certainly no exception, and develops with alternating successes precisely around the fusion between typically black metal glacial instances and more restless, suffering suggestions, which openly wink at a more (hard) core idea of ​​extreme music . More precisely, it appears that the guitar work is the closest in vocation to a modern and edgy, dissonant black, which starting from the mid-career Deathspell Omega onwards, goes as far as adding some razor cuts that even recall some moments of the glorious Scandinavian second wave : the drums, on the other hand, the bass and above all the voice, belong by inspiration to the most heterogeneous and frayed world of hardcore culture, expressed in this case in its blackest and most desperate meaning.
Thus the two extremes of Sordide's expressive scale are revealed, around which the fast passages of “Des Feux Plus Forts” come to life, the long instrumental fugue at the end of “Nos Cendres Et Nos Râles”, the nervous riffing of “Banlieues Rouges ” or the beautiful and independent bass lines that dot “La Poésie Du Caniveau”, in a continuous game of references between two musical dimensions parallel to each other.
In fact, the union of the parts does not always succeed in a completely homogeneous way and it happens on several occasions to experience a sense of strident opposition between the elements presented, as if they were mixed together without ever completely blending together. It is no coincidence, perhaps, that the best experiments succeed in songs like “Sous Vivre”, “La Beauté Du Désastre” or “Tout Est À La Mort”, in those moments where the tempo slows down and the band maintains a more rigid and contemplative, probably more in keeping with the musical nature of the Rouen trio. It is in these situations on the edge of doom and sludge that the vocal performance takes on its ideal dimension, approaching in intensity to formations such as Amenra and Celeste, although never reaching their devastating cathartic function.
Despite many years of activity, Sordide create a rather hostile work, where the boundaries between genres that would instead like to be merged into a single channel of malaise remain all too evident: the union of the individual parts, this time, does not give life to something superior to the simple addition of them.