In case you’re unaware, Bordeaux, France’s Year of No Light has been churning out some of the heaviest post-metal rock for the last two decades. Their new album, Consolamentum, coincides with the release of the Mnemophobia – a box set that includes twelve LPs covering the earlier parts of their career.
Consolamentum is a double-album and it takes its time to pile riff upon riff on you. The shortest track on the album is over seven minutes long. The opener, “Objuration,” is nearly thirteen minutes in length and sounds like a summoning ritual being prepared in a dark tomb by men and women in black robes, but they’re interrupted by heavy guitar riffs that sound like they’re played by mystic time-traveling warriors from a post-apocalyptic wasteland. “Alèthia” is the “short” track at seven minutes-thirty-nine seconds, and the guitars on it soar like birds over a vast ocean…on another planet.
Want some doom? Well, “Interdit aux Vivants, aux Morts et aux Chiens” (“Forbidden to the Living, the Dead, and the Dogs”) fits the bill with the title and the heavy, sludgy bass and guitars, the monster-walk drums, and the synths that seem to be the sound of an inter-dimensional door opening.
The bass on “Réalgar” hits like a war hammer swung by a frost giant, while the synths and guitars are the avalanche caused by it and the drums are packs of polar bears descending upon your poor fourth-level Dungeons and Dragons party trying to find shelter in the blizzard. The closer, “Came,” has a cool darkwave feel to it with the echoing drums and synths that float between uplifting and menacing.
This is an album that can transport you to another plane, or at least make the one in which you’re sitting seem tenuous.
Keep your mind open.
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[Thanks to Dave at US / THEM Group.]