I will admit that, despite the logo appearing familiar to me, Belgium’s Emptiness have not entered my auricular notice before. As such the dreamy, dark, post punk meets trip hop compositions of Vide do not surprise me so much as they would fans of the bands earlier Black and Death metal oeuvre .
This being their sixth outing the band have not suddenly made the leap from extremity to beatific eeriness. 2012’s Error still had the riffs and gruff vocals of the past but things were starting to take on a more experimental edge. This continued onto “Nothing But the Whole” which has a Killing Joke dark industrial vibe to it. This transition continued still further with “Not For Music” in 2017 which saw Jeordie White (Twiggy Ramirez) help with some knob twiddling in post. The resultant album is a dark gothic whisper of an album that exists in limbo between where Emptiness came from and where they are now.
Vide see’s the band cast off English as their language of choice choosing to sing in French and abandoning the Metal” aesthetic entirely. The old spiky log is gone – replaced by a bold typeset font that keeps with the arthouse post punk vibe. The album cover is their most extreme yet – a new born baby still shrouded by the fluids of its mother lies on a white cloth. Is the baby living or still born? I keep looking and I cannot decide. Does this album represent a new birth? A new dawn? Or the death of innocence?
The music is dark and beautiful. The accompanying press release mentions Massive Attack and Portishead and there is certainly some of that Bristolian sound in the languid beats and electronics that permeate Vide. There is also the starkness of Joy Division and Pornography and Faith era The Cure as well. The track “Vide, Incomplete” has the track trundling atmospheres of Cure B side “Another Journey by Train”.
This album feels like it should come with a large black coffee, a packet of Gitanes and a window view of a rainy Paris in grainy black and white. As such it may feel a little pretentious to some but if you allow yourself to be wooed by its arthouse romanticism there is plenty to enjoy .
The big echoey drums of Detrruis moi a l’amour make a refreshing change from the constant barrage of much of my current faves and the Robert Smith rhythm guitar backed by warped bassline of “Plus Jamais” makes me feel decidedly uneasy and yet calm at the same time. The cut-up whispers of the vocals add more surrealness to an already fucked up tableau.
Experimental music should be a challenge to listen to, not to wear some kind of hipster badge that shows you endured 45 mins of Drone or Free Jazz, just to make the listener remove other distractions and really listen to what the artist is doing. I have flitted between typing this whilst listening and just gazing into space. On some tracks I have latched onto certain parts of tracks – a particular steel guitar twang or a piano part and yearned for it when it is trampled by a dissonant bassline. Fuck it – this is their art and I am just experiencing it and unravelling the threads that most call to me.
The final track is the 7-minute L’ailleurs – which translates to Elsewhere and this is a perfect way to leave Vide. A trippy, somnambulant eerie track with swathes of surf guitar that remind me of Joey Santiago from Pixies. This is like falling down the rabbit hole and waking up on a surf beach ravaged by waves of oil but then making love to the one you love most amidst the slick. The twangs are slightly off kilter and everything is out of focus and trippy. Which describes this album perfectly.
Reinvention can be daring – if you are going to do it why not go all out. Emptiness has never sounded so full.
(8.5/10 Matt Mason)
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