(((O))) Review: Sacrenoir – Comme des Revenants Parmi les Ruines

Yet another Quebec collaboration, this time between two of the scene’s biggest names, Athros of Forteresse, and Monarque of the identically-named longrunning project (among many others, we hasten to add…) join together in Sacrenoir for a nine-track album Comme des Revenants Parmi les Ruines. The band name hints to my non-Francophone eye at the contents, sacred black of some description: clearly a homage to the genre’s thrashy (sometimes trashy) first wave origins.

It’s rougher, more primitive than much of their icily atmospheric output, but even through the nasty claustrophobia there’s a hint of grand expansion, like feeling echoes and breaths of wind from larger caverns up ahead of this dank and narrow tunnel.

The album keeps it’s hectic aura up full all the way throughout, as soon as the first riff has stomped all over a fifteen-second rainstorm intro into songs about devils, flames, ruins and vampires, sometimes even with lyrics in English(!). The pace is fast to faster still, a chaotic rumble through the pagan standing stones and ancient castles of the album cover. A fitting tribute to the black metal ghosts from before the Norwegians came along.