Out today, November 9th, on Sepulchral Productions are a trio of black metal grand slams in the form of Borgne's Entraves de l'Âme,Forteresse's Par Hauts Bois et Vastes Plaines,and Neige et Noirceur's La Seigneurie des Loups.
Forteresse - Par Hauts Bois et Vastes Plaines
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After the mechanical fury of IV, Borgne is back with a more complex and torturous opus on which the martial and brutal parts are interlaced with darker, more eerie moments. On this album, Borgne mastermind Bornyhake has allied himself with Xasthur's Malefic and Vinterriket's CZ who supply very haunting keyboard pieces to the music. But don't let the somewhat more organic side of this new album fool you,Entraves de l'Âme will plunge you directly into a universe of hatred and horror...
"Borgne brainchild Bornyhake knows how to handle his guitar, riffing out some great, creepy fuzz atop the blurred drums and hateful vokills. Bravo, Borgne: you've succeeded in winning over yet another convert to your cause!" - Zero Tolerance
"Black symphonic, grandiose and epic...dark, sinister, tragic."
- Flight of Pegasus
"From the lush acoustic to pure nightmarish blackened pain. Burzum, Mayhem and Older Darkthrone fans with love this as it holds just into those Ideals as well. Bombastic..." - Absolute Zero
"I quite dig it. Reminds me of 1995 - and I mean that in the best possible way!" - Nathan T. Birk
For its third album, Forteresse takes a more hypnotic and introspective approach and offers a majestic and melancholic opus that is sure to appeal to the fans of the group. Athros' voice, Moribond's sweeping guitar melodies and that ever cold and raw sound, all trademarks of the band, are as ever-present as always, but the outfit has also developed it's atmospheric side by adding keyboards passages that add an ambient touch Forteresse's own Métal Noir Québécois. As the album in itself is but one long journey and has to be listened in its entirety to be best discovered, the group has elected to name all tracks by the same name as the album...
"The tunes here are immense. The sound is dense: melodies are keyboard-led, the guitars thicken the texture and add to the monumental weight of the music, and the vocals are a parched roar - beautiful." - Zero Tolerance
"This is full of hope and sorrow, loss and grief and epic in the undertaking that it is trying to present. Simply just blown away by this release." - Absolute Zero
Neige et Noirceur - La Seigneurie des Loups
Croix de Feu, Croix de Fer
Ancien Folklore Québécois
1837
La Seigneurie des Loups
Les Plaines de Krolok
While its split with Monarque is still fresh, Neige et Noirceur strikes again, for the first time under the Sepulchral Productions banner. Without a doubt the best release of the group to this day, La Seigneurie Des Loups features, as usual, a raw Black/Ambient breed that might bring Paysage d'Hiver to mind to certain while forging it's own identity as well as having a very Quebecois, side. Cold, dark and hypnotic, Neige et Noirceur summons images of these long, wintery Quebec nights!
"Neige et Noirceur's La Seigneurie des Loups is the first in 25 or so albums that I can't stop listening to! Music is art, and this album proves it." 9.5/10 - Sara Heitman (Blistering.com)
"Their music is pretty similar, too: although less docile this time round, Neige Et Noirceur play a very woods-and-snow nature-mystical brand of post-Burzum black metal, which is strangely easy on the ear despite the rasping aggression." - Zero Tolerance
"La Seigneurie des Loups offers us 6 deeply atmospheric, emotionally intense and certainly dark tracks reminiscent of a mixture of early Burzum, Markduk blastbeats and In The Woods, both in their styles as well as in a surprisingly (for a Quebecer) Scandinavian sound." -Battle Helm
