Neige Morte rips your ears off and stomps on them with their latest album, IIII.
According to the Microsoft Translator, Neige Morte becomes Dead Snow in English. A fascinating concept if you ponder it a minute. The band members, from Lyon, France and Göteborg (Gothenburg), Sweden, are described this way on their website and elsewhere, J.G.: drums, S.G.: bass, and S.A.: guitar and vocals. They apparently want to let the music speak for itself. The lineup has changed over the last few years a little, but remains a trio dedicate to their own style of black metal. Black metal itself is characterized by fast noisy loud guitars and has strong punk and hardcore roots. From this baseline, Neige Morte diverges in its own direction, concentrating often on cacophony and chaos with an artistic obsession.
There are four principal songs and three transitional pieces, fugues you might say, on IIII. If you think of it in vinyl terms, there is a short song and long song on each side. The short song on side one is “Hlcst” and it is very upsetting. It is slasher movie screeching calamity in the guitars and torture in the vocals. The percussion is a thousand raging villagers beating on your walls and the rhythm speeds up and slows down unpredictably. Without so much as a breath, “Svart Hål” starts, an eight minute test of your ability to control your reflexes. The feeling of the music is violence and also dread. Side two? “Lämna Inga Spår” is the moody and doomy short song, a swarm of frenzied poisonous insects swirling around your head and taking the occasional sharp dive right at your face. The long piece on side two, “IIII,” starts off like a medieval battle rolling down a mountainside. The guitar breaks off into a frenzied schizophrenic freakout just before the two minute mark, and then the song levels out into an instantiation of hate. Critical mass is definitely achieved. Neigi Morte is not music to relax to. If you want to burn of some excess energy and emotion, IIII is for you. Recommended for black metal and noise fans.
Division Records has the vinyl and you can get the digital at Bandcamp on May 15. On Division Records’ webstore, it reads that the first 20 orders of IIII vinyl also receive the previous release, Trinnnt. I don’t know if that has sold out yet or not so get there quick if you are interested.
Photo is from the band’s website.
Links.
https://www.facebook.com/neigemorte
https://neigemorte.bandcamp.com/
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