Une saison de dépérissement, une saison de symbolisme méprisant. — What sort of leathery bird sings to the fool in their sleep? Fangs of intrigue pierce their thoughts and wet their flow with the intimacy of a flitting tongue va-et-vient across the subconscious, a daimonian display of destabilization to cortices awash with horrifying naturalist empathy, a grey zone soon emptied of necessary cynicism’s survivance. To the sensorially guided and obsessive libertine even a vague dream-state surviving in mind beyond a subconscious restlessness is a vulgarity left unspoken beyond what shadow-play and unreal thought such an environment inspires. A lost feeling, a trait of great poètes maudits of the past who lived terrible, passionately sparking lives and left behind little more than dust-addled culture and literary boon after death begins to bite and bleed at the ear as Nizhny Novgorod, Russia-based décadent melodic black metal trio Passéisme once again flap their triumphal zeal in generous erupting throngs of golden leaf’d and black-veined subversion here on their doubly inspired and matured second full-length album. What potency these fellowes revive here is nothing short of engrossing in its beauteous maze-like weave, no less rapturous in its eager striking upon the iron of austere and gloriously brutal melodicism yet they’ve curated plenty more depth beyond chansons de geste and wild arrogance herein, lending a biting purgatorial frustration to the persistently flooding exuberance of the experience otherwise.

Passéisme formed circa 2019 between current and former members of somewhat well-known underground death metal bands with each of the core trio sporting ~ten or more years of entrenchment under their belts at that point. With capability pressing at their back for a differently ambitious presentation and style the themes, inspiration and evocative melodic voice of the group were ‘ready prepared and thoughtfully formed before their public debut hit in the form of the ‘Austerity Parade‘ (2019) demo, a two song showcase of intent in preamble toward an imminent full-length (‘Eminence‘, 2021) which was well placed as a miraculous outlier in the style of Québécois and French melodic black metal severity. Upon reviewing the album favorably my general summing of events suggested “these guys intentionally invoke the same elite spiritus of bands like Véhémence, Sühnopfer and Aorlhac. […] this is their own “brutal” take on the style, shouted and impassioned to a violent degree. There is a venomous quality here that I look for in all black metal releases and of course it helps that this record is all momentum and energetic attack.” suggesting an album which was a righteous fit on the eclectic Antiq and of a certain style but also unique in tone. It was one of only a few melodic black metal records of the last decade to consider erasing the sleepy, atmospheric dreaminess of the form and instead throttle away in a rapturous trod.

Examining the ‘self’, one’s environs and their placement within it with equal disdainful scrutiny and producing an experiential piece communicated entirely through emotional and sensorial reactivity could loosely describe the modus of the symbolist and the black metal artiste as each present vital questioning of reality and begin to scour a multitude of human contradictions with fearless strokes of their respective brush. Passéisme seem to equate these dramatic forms as they present works which read off the page as breakthroughs ripped right from the chest, merging a gut-barked and highly charged form of melodic black metal thruster with a luxuriously detailed consonance to the point of swift and sometimes anxietous streaks of brilliance. There is a fevered, furious feeling to thier delivery which pairs with the estranged, confrontational poetry of fin-de-siècle (turn of the 19th century) French poetry and prose in a very natural way, it was the central point of genius to sprout in mind after a few years spent enjoying their debut. Today we could generally assume ‘Alternance‘ as a continuation of said forms but as the title suggests there is an oscillation in hand, a seasonal motion in mind which frames the experience as cyclic in its morph. In more plain terms this is a better-rounded experience which finds ways to step away from constantly shotgunned brutality as before, letting certain pieces breathe and brood in the hall while melodies become doubly complex, a possessed conductor’s elaborations which soon become gloriously run-on and reveled-in throughout. What you’d loved about the debut is there but here we see both sides of the coin etched deeper.

Duality in complimentary force, unevenly mirrored experiences, and willful juxtapositions placed in order to express a confounded delirium offer key tension in mind from the first glance at the tracklist here as Passéisme present what I’d identify as affirming vexations, meaning which one might have to mill over or personalize if the need to interpret arises. While their work has become doubly graceful in its composition per a now slightly less brutal, slapped-at high energy rhythm section the scrambling mad work of guitarist I.M. is notably harried in avoidance of any too-polished or deeply harmonized step into melodic metal’s blasé age-old standard. The need to inject some richness, a heightened feeling of decadent anciency comes with classical guitar treatments and supportive keyboards for the sake of warmed atmosphere in sleepier, dramatic sections of longer pieces such as the extended, epic mull of “Ominous Bravure Chant”. The best moments of guitar work set within ‘Alternance‘ are admittedly difficult to cut from the body as a whole since there are no real missteps or out of place settings within the artful dance of it all, yet we could look to “Rhapsodic Annoyance Chant” as a most potent showcase of each of the three artists at their most active, high density presentation.

Prominent bass guitar tone delivered in both contrast and parity with the directional swerving of the lead guitars brings a brightly intelligent directorial sense to a clangorous finger-picked voicing of vocalist/bassist K.K. who develop an increasingly virtuosic touch to his presence in Passéisme without losing the violence of his vocal gusto. There is a harmonious sort of battle happening in most of these songs where the rhythm guitar and bass guitar work through madly dashing statements which teeter on the brink of stream of consciousness or abstract pathing until fully resolved. “Rhapsodic Annoyance Chant” and “Stubborn Zeal Chant” most readily serve this madness in their weave and in this sense I would suggest those pieces as compliment to what ‘Eminence‘ did best but retooled, Though those two pieces don’t necessarily reveal the entire hidden world which ‘Alternance‘ ultimately holds you’ll have gotten a good sense of the better balanced production values, brighter voice given to the bass and lead guitars as well as the increased distance from the drum kit which sits higher, sloping downward into the perceived space with guitars on either side filling the room to the ceiling. There is another side of the moon here which conditionally reveals itself within the appropriately explosive opener “Azure Mockery Chant”, a stream of wall-to-wall guitar driven melodicism which wheels and wanders to the point of nearly scaling the walls with enthusiasm.

Where can they take it beyond “chivalric Baudelaire-core”? I would say the middle two pieces within the cœur of ‘Alternance‘ have expanded their world in a notable way. The aforementioned “Ominous Bravure Chant”, which features synth from mix/master maestro Colin Marston (who also features with K.K. in Paroxysm Unit), is something freshly atmospheric and emotive from the quite driven and tunneling-hard spiritus of the band as well as proof of what they can do within a longer-form piece when given breathing room. This we cannot so quickly hand off as directly similar to groups like Forteresse or Sühnopfer even if the soul still speaks to a certain obscure oasis of melodic black metal fixatives and finery, the nuance which plants a seedling here slowly becomes their own. “Opulent Sepulchre Chant” otherwise kicks off the tunnel vision of Side B otherwise, a thread which recalls the most fluid sluice of Swedish black metal as it naturally applies to the less melodramatic raised eyebrow of French melodic black metal; At ~37 minutes and six pieces the listening experience is dense with frantically paced ideas which strike out into clenched-fisted melodicism even more often and in lengthier throng than prior, offering a meaningful enough extension of what one would expect from Passéisme beyond their debut. A charismatic and bold sense of delivery is of course a big part of the success of the experience but this is best parsed and appreciated on a personal level rather than further described. I’ve found it to be one of the most memorable and chest-beaten works of melodic black metal this year. A very high recommendation.

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