Style: Progressive/Atmospheric Black Metal (mixed, French vocals)
Recommended for fans of: Thy Catafalque, Arkona (Russian one), Midnight Odyssey
Review by: Sam
Country: France
Release date: 4 August, 2023
“Bedroom black metal musician” is one of metal’s most prominent stereotypes, and for good reason. Chances are big that for nearly every week of the past twenty years, you will find multiple releases by solo black metal projects. Often these are completely unremarkable, being either generic second wave worship or unlistenable experimental garbage. However, with quantity eventually comes quality, so even if their relative percentage is low, there is a surprising total amount of killer experimental black metal solo projects. Ars Moriendi – led by “Arsonist” – is one of those.
This project has been around for a long time. According to Metal-Archives, “Arsonist” started lighting his bedroom on fire in 2001, and has been adding fuel ever since. It took a while before the flames would make their imprint on an actual CD, debuting in 2008 after a slew of toasted demo tapes, but his environmental pollution has been steady ever since. In the past four years he’s ramped up the process, no longer just igniting his latest IKEA purchases but dumping gasoline on them as well, yielding explosive output. Lorsque les coeurs s’assèchent is the latest charred delicacy to come out of his bedroom, and I’m here to tell you whether or not it has the right seasoning.
Like much of black metal, the writing focus here lies more on flow and atmosphere than on recurring themes and motifs. If done well, this style of writing can take you on transformative adventures through bewildering sonic landscapes. When done poorly, it becomes aimless meandering with no real highlights to speak of that etch themselves into your memory. Ars Moriendi sit somewhere in the middle of that spectrum. Arsonist likes spicing up his base melodic/atmospheric black metal sound with influences from electronic music, from the dungeon synth on “Quand tout (…)” to the trance and industrial effects of “Nous sommes passés”, to the spacy percussion sounds on “Le blasphémateur”. These various influences give the record a lot of personality.
Lorsque les coeurs s’assèchent is not bereft of good ideas. Even within the “regular” black metal portions of the record, many creative choices provide strong song direction,–particularly, the guitarwork is excellent. “Quand tout (…)” and “Le ver (…)” in particular stand out for their great riffs, and the guitar harmonies are consistently hypnotizing and compelling throughout. The band is good at building tension and immersion in their dream-like audioscapes. What they’re not so good at though is payoff, and the title track opener is a prime example of this. It starts with a beautiful acoustic passage and morphs gradually into an intense black metal tune. Eventually it drops and goes into a thrilling percussive build-up, but then the pay-off is just lackluster with mediocre riffs and a boring guitar solo. “Quand tout (…)” is almost the exact same structure, but this time with better riffs and dungeon synth effects which I wish were louder in the mix but are pleasant either way. However this time the second half of the song feels disconnected from the first half, giving roughly four minutes of excess meandering.
And unfortunately, there is a lot of meandering on this record. “Voyage céleste” introduces cool trance elements, but the song goes nowhere. The band sometimes up the intensity of the song, but not in a way that builds on what came before, so it’s just random and unmemorable more often than not. The second half of the album is decidedly better with song direction than the first (“Nous sommes passé” is a much better trance-bm song), but the last song “Le blasphémateur” is too monotonous in its main ideas to justify its length. In general, I feel like this album is often stuck in between writing “flow” and clear-cut compositions. It succeeds at both in a vacuum, but together they get in each other’s way and hamper the album’s potential. Lorsque les coeurs s’assèchent is a good album, but it could have been much better.
Recommended tracks: Quand tout (…), Le ver dans le fruit, Nous sommes passé
You may also like: Abduction, Dordeduh/Negura Bunget, Déhà
Final verdict: 6/10
Related links: Bandcamp | Spotify | Facebook | Metal-Archives page
Label: Archaic Sound – Bandcamp | Facebook | Official Website
Ars Moriendi is:
– “Arsonist” (everything)
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