With quite the impactful debut, hailing from the north of France comes Fardeaux, roughly translating to “burdens” in English, is a black metal duo who produce some rather creative music for the genre. Somewhere along the lines of Deathspell Omega, Andavald, and Dødsengel, this band is able to mold and bend the recognizable black metal approach to their more personal expression. There’s a lot of thought and emotion that went behind each of these seven tracks and its very evident given the very high quality production approach at hand here.
As mentioned before, some could easily label this as ‘avant-garde black metal’, which is a label I personally despise, but the approach here is rather different from traditional black metal. While much of the same elements are there, its a lot more progressive, with some sweeping guitar solos that are thrown through out the rather lengthy tracks. With the album at hand being just a little over 45 and a half minutes, its an epic journey that the guys behind Fardeaux put the listener through, and its well worth the journey. Each track create their own sense of superiority and power, as well as personal darkness and anger that is very evident through the emotions behind the music and delivery of the harsh and at times melodic vocals.
The instrumentation is incredibly clean. Tight guitars with speedy drums to match. While, its not always speeding on by, the drums are able to blend itself between the more slower and mid-paced passages to the more high intensity parts that truly get the adrenaline pumping. The guitars are the main shine through out the album in my opinion. With some moments creating simplistic and catchy riffs, more often than not you’ll be experiencing dissonant and dizzying guitar riffs layered under wailing guitar solos and barking vocals that make you feel both panicked yet ready to push the limits through what ever adversary blocks your path. Like I mentioned before, the production is incredibly clean, each instrument is audible and can be clearly discerned from one another. There’s not one part of the band that’s lacking in my opinion and is quite surprising and refreshing to hear an album with this creative approach not coping out and going the easy route with added synths or effects to add onto that wall of sound that this genre is known to build. Very minimal effects are used if at all, and that to me is a huge plus, keeping it as authentic as possible.
This was quite the surprising release as it came out of no where for me personally and came into it rather hesitantly at first, holding my breath expecting yet another DSO clone from roughly the same area. But on the contrary I was surprised to hear something that was fresh and new, and more importantly authentic to the artist and not just doing what was done before. Would definitely recommend this album for fans of those bands that were mentioned, but would recommend it for the album its self as its well worth it.