Two days ago, in one of our regular Sunday posts about black metal, I raved about a song (“Révolte”) I had come across by a band from Rouen, France, named Sordide. One thing led to another, and today we’re bringing you the chance to listen to another new Sordide song named “L’ombre“. Like “Révolte”, it appears on the band’s new album, Fuir la lumière (escape the light), which will be released tomorrow by Avantgarde Music — and if you come back to our site tomorrow you’ll have a chance to hear the whole album, because we’re premiering that, too.
The new album comes a bit less than two years after Sordide’s debut album, La France a peur, and after two French tours as well as gigs in France, Belgium, and the Netherlands. I’m going to resist the temptation to write about the album as a whole — or I’ll having nothing more to say tomorrow when we present a full album stream. So for now, I’ll just spill a few words about “L’ombre”.
When I first heard “Révolte”, I was blown away. As I wrote on Sunday, it’s an absolutely exhilarating guitar workout that stays in the red zone for its entire run, with a punk-ish bass and drum rhythm at the outset transforming into a blasting tornado as the guitarist moves into searing inferno territory — and ultimately just becomes deranged. I was even more impressed when I learned that the instrumental tracks on “Révolte”, like the rest of the album, were recorded live, in the space of two days.
Having heard that song, I wondered how Sordide could top it, or even run a close race with it. But those turn out to be the wrong questions to ask. Where “Révolte” really was a race from the very beginning, “L’ombre” begins as a crawl — a combination of a slow, grim bass riffing and unnerving guitar dissonance — and then becomes a bleak, mid-paced, stomping rocker.
The vocals are as clawing and vicious as on the earlier song, but here Sordide have also spread a blanket of degradation and mental collapse across the music. But despite the hallucinatory aura of derangement brought on by the skittering lead guitar, the song still gets the head moving. And at the end of the song, the rumble of timpani links arms with the bass riffing with which it began — before the track collapses in a squall of dissonance.
After these two tracks, you might well ask yourself, What in the world is the rest of this album like? You’ll find out tomorrow.
Fuir la lumière is set for release through Avantgarde Music on October 5th. A double-LP version will follow from Avantgarde Music, Immortal Frost Productions, Lost Pilgrims Records, and Saka Cost, and the tape version will be released by Breathe Plastic Records.
Sordide plan a few gigs before the end of 2016 in France, Belgium, and Germany, and then will be preparing a two-week tour in Europe next April with the French band Satan.
Now, here’s “L’ombre”, as well as a stream of “Révolte” in case you haven’t heard it yet.
https://sordide.bandcamp.com/album/fuir-la-lumi-re
https://www.facebook.com/sordideband