AMESOEURS - Ruines Humaines

A stunning little gem, a tiny but towering French treasure.

"Ruines Humaines", sixteen-odd minutes of depressive black-metal steeped in dark undertones. Three gorgeous songs, three small arrows straight to the heart. A single rough diamond.

The music of Neige (vocals, guitar, bass, electronics; formerly of Alcest and Peste Noire), Audrey Sylvain (vocals) and Winterhalter (drums) is a frozen shroud of terminal melancholy. Against the anxieties and frustrations of modern society, Amesoeurs is, ultimately, a scornful spit, a cry of pain, a first whimper of repressed happiness.

"Bonheur Amputé" moves with the solemn pace of a triumphal march, but one that comes after a brutal battle. The opening feels like a promise - the kind that's actually kept in the end. Piercing screams voice a despair bordering on ecstasy. Harrowing. You feel it immediately, with no restraint. A crystalline, sumptuously acoustic isolationism. Transcendent, just enough. "Cold rock", as Neige calls it. And indeed, there's a frozen mood radiating from these small shreds of youthful fury, straight out of Bagnols-sur-Cèze. Romanticism - the kind that's already sick, injected with an annihilating streben.

The title-track opens with delicate, weary acoustic chords. But it's pure prelude, a reverse apotheosis, infected clamour, before the compressed doom (inevitably tinged with black metal) that follows. Parossistically desperate - like someone who, exhausted, can no longer bear the crowd that scatters emotions, diluting their vitality into an alienating mechanism, all the way to the desert, all the way to the silence of the soul (see the metallic clangs that seal its end).

"Faiblesse Des Sens" has something of a gothic Galaxie 500, barely lit up by Audrey Sylvain's ethereal voice. It's an intimate journey, despite everything - despite the galloping riff (a deep wound very reminiscent of Cure) and the electric catastrophe that closes it out, a tail of atmospheric distortions hurling its lyricism skyward. A horizontal marvel, the definitive escape.

Noi, amesoeurs, siamo i bambini di questo secolo triste e metallico.

The best EP of the year.

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27/11/2006