Shelter. It's such a fucking beautiful shoegaze album with impeccable balance and smoothness. No doubt you've heard it by now – if you haven't, well get on with it!
But shelter from what? It's something that's been playing on my mind for weeks as I ponder the shift in Alcest on their latest album. We had plenty of warning that all metal elements were to be abandoned – announcements were made over a year ago, but Alcest was only ever about one thing and that wasn't the music, or at least not the style of music. The black metal, shoegaze, post-rock - that was all just incidental to telling one single story, and telling that story was the reason Alcest came to exist.
Two years ago when I spoke to composer/ singer/ guitarist Neige, he talked about the fading memories of his visions of a superior and parallel existence in his childhood. “Anyway to get this inspiration is not really infinite, because I am getting older and this is getting more blurry. One day I will have to have new things to speak about because it’s not a very open concept. It’s very specific, very special.”
Neige is not bound by Alcest – he could easily have started yet another project to record and perform Shelter or used one of his other existing avenues. But instead he abandoned the one thing Alcest was created to do. This in turn led to the abandonment of that key musical element that had made them the pre-eminent blackgaze band. How do you then examine the new record in isolation of the old, when both its body and soul had been replaced? First you have to decide if this is actually Alcest.
Bands change. That's fine and in many ways it's actually good, even where the results are less than spectacular. It's good to see bands evolve or even change radically rather than make the same album over and over again, but this is different. In all previous releases you could sense the tension and despair as Neige sought to stay positive through his internal battle with fading memories, his inability to get his message across no matter how hard and skilfully he tried, and the external pressures from those metalheads who think they should determine what a band plays and the press that is often disrespectful of Neige's experiences. This was reflected in the dynamics and contrasts the band is famous for and fans adore them for.
And now I'm really not sure what happened. I'm not sure whether Shelter is victory or defeat. Did Neige win, or did he surrender. And because I can't work that out I really don't know if it's beautifully restrained in its triumph, or just beautifully sad behind a smiling face. And I'm worried because I think it's probably the latter, which means that Alcest may no longer really exist. And that makes me sad.
