Paramnesia “a condition or phenomenon involving distorted memory or confusions of fact and fantasy, such as confabulation or déjà vu.” Ah righty, sounds familiar, we have all been here before haven’t we? As far as music is concerned this affliction is the name taken by a French act who apart from drummer and visual realist, Pierre aka Business for Satan seems somewhat shrouded in mystery. Don’t go looking for official Facebook pages or anything here. Active since 2005 it is only recently that recorded output has materialised in the form of an EP with two tracks I & II and a split with Unru featuring III. This is the debut album and it contains two tracks each spanning 20 minutes in length; can you guess what they are called?
The biographical info centers on the fact that the band are despite being French highly defined by a sound that is similar to those dwelling in the Cascadian scene citing the likes of Weakling, Leviathan and Ash Borer among them. The first number starts with acoustic guitar and an eerie somewhat loud tone in a constant siren like call behind it. It’s a bit of a false sense of security as shortly after everything piles in on top of it, huge battering drums, massively fast guitar strums and hellacious vocal screams. It’s a sudden full on layered assault that seems designed to pretty much suck all your breath away. If you like this humungous windswept, abyss-dropping tumult all well and good because as far as this track is concerned you have approximately 18 minutes left of it to deal with. There is not a huge amount of deviation from what the band have set up and it simply carries on ripping up the firmament for duration. There are a couple of instances when the music lightens allowing tones of the vocals to become more noticeable as they echo and shriek slightly back in the mix before the battering ploughs in again. It’s pretty consistent with many from the aforementioned scene such as Wolves In The Throne Room and my problem is that listening to it on album just doesn’t quite have the same effect as the music when catching it live. You would think that it would be the opposite with all the tricks of the trade but the organic feel of it just is not the same coming out of computer speakers compared to a PA and whilst many bands playing in this style blow me away live I never really seem to get into the density of it all as far as this medium is concerned.
I could say that the biggest difference between the two tracks is that the second (V) is two seconds shorter than the first (IV) but that would be selling things a bit short. Still it is all very much the same in most ways (yep that feeling of déjà vu quickly sets in here). Once the lighter doomy beginnings of the track are dispensed of things fly into that destructive vortex again and pick you up like a whirlwind, taking you off on a dizzying ride. Call me picky but I just didn’t get the depth, atmosphere and emotion from this that I would have liked and on the whole the music is far too one dimensional for its own good. More versatility please!
(6/10 Pete Woods)
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