Metal or not metal? That is not the question as Les Chants du Hasard (Songs of Chance) turn to orchestral music to create dark and violent soundscapes, while including soprano and tenor voices, the spoken word, the voices of children and metal voices to help define the mood.
The album starts with a short piece “Le Moine” (The Monk). Dark orchestral music introduces us a world of frightened screams and terror. This is no walk in the park. A cacophony of ghastly distorted sounds, accentuated by a male baritone and an operatic female singer adding to tension and grotesquerie, constitute “Les Prismes”. There’s an air of Peter and the Wolf about this, but always with added spice and terror and ghoulishness. Nothing can be too theatrical. The atmosphere is both stormy and melancholic. As the orchestra strikes in on “Salve Regina”, I think of crashing tragedy. The music is solemn but the distorted operatic male singer and other vocal sound effects make this ghoulish and utterly bizarre. I accept that it’s not metal, it’s not opera, it’s not a soundtrack but what is it? The orchestral music is imposing. The vocals are varied and their distortedness is all for macabre effect, but I felt lost in this dark and alien world. “Livre Troisième” was imposing itself on me in a mystifying way. Our suffering singer returns for the morbid “Milliers d’une Fois”, to be joined by the haunting choral section. It’s sad, dark and demented. The musical arrangements are as ever extravagant. I did laugh when I heard a young child operatically taking on the vocals of “La Comptine” (The Rhyme). This is the nursery rhyme of your nightmares. Amid swathes of continuing orchestral darkness, we continue to head remorselessly towards the lunatic asylum, led by the female opera singer. The title of this latest brain-turning exercise “L’Oubli” would suggest we are being delivered to oblivion. There’s an awful lot of pain and suffering, which I’m sharing but not for the same reason as the protagonists of this grotesque opera. The end of “L’Oubli” leads imperiously into “Le Repos” (Rest) and the dramatic effect cannot be understated. But this transforms into a spoken piece with a melancholic background before we fly back off operatically into this strange and incomprehensible world to finish.
This sounded interesting on paper but just wasn’t my cup of tea. I’m torn between praising its imagination and originality, which undoubtedly there is, and concluding that it’s an exercise in pointless cacophony. “Livre Troisième” did do my head in but I concede it is a brave effort and a different experience. It is however not one that I personally would want to repeat.
(4/10 Andrew Doherty)
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