ALBUM REVIEW: Spirituality and Distortion – Igorrr

Eccentric, eclectic and experimental: for well over a decade IGORRR, the monstrous brainchild of French multi-instrumentalist Gautier Serre, has been set loose upon the world of heavy music. Terrifying onlookers, inspiring admiring awe, and persuading analogue purists of the beastly potential of programmed electronic instruments, IGORRR has earned itself a divisive reputation as a project.

It is, after all, easy to imagine that one might struggle to see the malign beauty in Serre’s musical concoction: a not-so-subtle blend of baroque, black metal, breakcore, djent, Romani folk music, technical death metal, trip-hop. There is, accordingly, a Daliesque and surreal quality to IGORRR’s music. One can scarcely conceive of how such disparate styles might have been brought together, but Nostril and Hallelujah showed Serre to be a master of his craft, able to convincingly unify diverse textures into his musical melange. With the release of Savage Sinusoid, IGORRR transitioned away from solo-project status and became a fully-fledged band as Serre recruited longstanding vocal collaborators and fellow ÖXXÖ XÖÖX members Laure Le Prunenec and Laurent Lunoir into the fold, as well as TREPALIUM drummer Sylvain Bouvier. Rostered on Metal Blade Records, IGORRR was lent some mainstream credibility and able to reach a wider audience than ever before, garnering an enthusiastic press reception in the process. Spirituality and Distortion follows in the wake of that success, and IGORRR bear the weight of some considerable expectation on their collective hunched-back.

Any project deserving of the ‘experimental’ label will not tread on the same ground twice, and Spirituality and Distortion’s artwork gives the listener an early indication that change is afoot, depicting the messianic emergence of IGORRR’s blackletter ‘I’ amidst a night-time Near Eastern scene, brought to life in a Goya-esque engraved style. Those with a keen eye for the visual arts will recognise the illustrious FØRTIFEM’s work here, which has recently been featured on albums by other notable French acts REGARDE LES HOMMES TOMBER and ALCEST. While you would hesitate to call Spirituality and Distortion a concept album, nor even an album with a concept, traditional Eastern music and textures recur throughout the album and predominate on Downgrade Desert and Camel Dancefloor.

The effect is much like experiencing the hallucinogenic trip or fever dream of a Bedouin who is, through his delusions, transported away to IGORRR’s surreal musical world: just enough of his reality survives to give his experience a grounded dreamlike quality, but there are points of complete departure from his surroundings. Parpaing (‘breeze block’ in French), for instance, stands out as an almost purely technical death metal track, with some breakcore techniques implemented throughout. The track is also noteworthy, of course, for featuring the instantly recognisable vocal talents of George ‘Corpsegrinder’ Fisher (of labelmates CANNIBAL CORPSE fame) whose inclusion will no doubt make the record more palatable and appealing to the mainstream metal audience.

Generally, in fact, the album continues Savage Sinusoid’s tendency to lean into a more recognisably metal sound: breakbeats do not rule the day, as they once did on Nostril and Hallelujah, while breakdowns and chugging riffs abound. It would be fair to say, on balance, that IGORRR now resembles a more conventional metal band than the highly idiosyncratic side-project it once was. That is not to say, however, that IGORRR have entirely forsaken their eccentricities, far from it, but their experimentation is now more often simply textural than compositional. As a result, the album feels more tonally and dynamically balanced, more listenable and accessible than Savage Sinusoid, perhaps.  

Serre keeps things varied by enlisting an extensive pool of session musicians, including violinist Timba Harris, bassist Mike Leon, pianist Matt Lebofsky, Mehdi Haddab on the Oud, Pierre Mussi on accordian, Fotini Kokkala on the Kanoun, and harpsichordist Benjamin Bardiaux, among others – although, fans will be disappointed to hear that Patrick the Chicken has not, apparently, made a reappearance on this record. As with his decision to take on a living, breathing drummer, this belies Serre’s shifting away from electronic sampling and programming, and towards live instrumentation: a production choice which is likely to endear the project to the rock and metal crowd, but potentially alienate whatever is left of their breakbeat audience.

With Spirituality and Distortion, IGORRR have tentatively placed one foot forward, towards a conventional metal sound, whilst keeping the other firmly planted in the eccentricity and experimentalism which made the project interesting in the first place. The risk is that they open themselves up to criticism from both mainstream critics and ardent experimentalists, but it is exactly this sort of risk-taking that makes IGORRR an admirable and worthwhile project; one which will continue to attract an audience, whatever they do next.

Rating: 8/10

Spirituality And Distortion is set for release on March 27th via Metal Blade Records.

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