ALBUM REVIEW: Demande à la poussière – Demande à la poussière
France’s DEMANDE À LA POUSSIÈRE may only have been active for little over a year, but their first full length record packs a solid punch. That album, recorded about a year ago, has only just seen the light of day under the banner of Argonauta Records. With each of it members coming from a variety of musical backgrounds, from black metal to hardcore, the music is, as you can expect, brilliantly diverse and intense. That album, which takes its name from the band itself, is a great debut record that shows a band that are, without hyperbole, one of the more powerful and eclectic albums you’re likely to hear this year.
L’Univers, with its thick, sludgy and groove-laden guitar lines, is an excellent way to start this record. It’s got an incredibly solid rhythm that helps to provide plenty of weight to the sound. The lead guitars and vocals are equally vicious and intense. The guitars ebb and flow between tight melodies and jarring, unorthodox hooks that make this song sound more powerful and aggressive. Le Lendermain is another brilliant track, built around thunderous drumming and tight, melody tinged guitar lines which are a little evocative of PARADISE LOST. There is a noticeable hardcore influence underpinning this track, which is shrouded in a thick and acerbic black metal sound, with some genuinely imaginative and eclectic guitar hooks and some hellish, arid vocals digging their nails into you from the second they first make an appearance. There’s a lot of impressive rhythmic hooks also, showing the band are able to craft excellent music on everything single level of their tracks. The eerie, cleaner guitar passages that bring this track to a close have a certain, progressive bent to them, and provide tonnes of atmosphere to the proceedings.
Etrangle carried on in the vein of the last tracks closing moments, with sharper, cleaner tones which bring to mind shoe-gaze and give this track a great ambience straight away. It slowly but surely begins to builds to a monstrous crescendo, which turns into the track proper; it never fully embraces the dense and tar thick sound that has characterised this album up until this point, and focusing more of building a sweetly melodic, atmospheric sound, making use of clean vocals rather than bestial howls or crushing gutturals. It’s a great and refreshing change of pace that further showcases this bands song writing talents.
L’unique Certitude, with it’s dense, oppressive opening riff, is a much headier track. This is unrelentingly thick and sludgy, a far more primitive and primal affair with some eerie, disjointed lead guitar hooks contrasting with the utter viciousness of the rest of this track. The vocals are only used sparingly, but the strangled howls and demonic bellows work incredibly well with the music, matching its primal sound down to the ground. La Parfum des Cites Perdues is a cacophonous, dissonant slab of oppressively dark music with a strong hardcore influence. The twin guitar sections work well, as do the grating, droning sections that make up the bulk of this song. Everything sounds intense and fierce, from the guitars right down to the tortured and embittered vocals, which shift from anguished howls to haunting clean passages throughout, taking the listener on a roller-coaster ride of emotions. This is an absolutely fantastic track that ups the ante as far as aggression goes. Accroche is a much more measured and sublime offering than what has preceded it on the record thus far. Breezy guitar chords and tight, syncopated drums provide a solid level of musical depth to the mix, with some grating, noisy guitar moments peppered throughout being the only indication of what’s to come. It eventually launches into a bombastic, fierce slab of groove inflected blend of hardcore and extreme metal. It’s an eclectic and impressive change of pace that showcases the range of sounds this band are able to creating.
Condamnes is a decent track with a solid sludge undertone, and tar thick distortion that effectively tests your speakers. It’s a slow, chugging track, with little musical variety other than the key musical motif and the rage filled growls, but it proves to be one of the heaviest tracks on the whole record. It’s undeniably heavy, almost too much so, but it does an excellent job of giving the listener some aggressive and fierce at this point in the record, and proves to be a brilliant climactic song. The eighth and final track, 360, has a strong Industrial feel to it, with a lot of thick, impenetrable ambient noise and sound bites making up the bulk of this track. Drums only begin to come into the equation well into the tracks second half, and even then they only serve as a tool to aid this song towards its crescendo. This is a fairly good track to end the record on, providing yet another insight into the scope of the bands influences and capabilities.
As far as debut records go, Demande à la poussière is an incredibly strong one. Rhythmically, this is solid, and the groove at the foundation of the band’s music acts as a great base to craft brilliant and immersive music upon. There’s such a variety of different influences on display here that it’s hard to find any point of this record dull or boring, and there’s bound to be something for the vast majority of listeners, from the slow and intense sludge parts to the ever present hardcore influence. There’s plenty of promise here, and we’re sure that the band will exceed the high bar they have set themselves to overcome musically.
Rating: 8/10
Demande à la poussière is out now via Argonauta Records.
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