DELIVERANCE: Holocaust 26:1-46 (BLACK METAL,Doom): review / opinion to read on Music Waves

Probably because its two thinking heads, singer Pierre Duneau (Memories Of A Dead Men) and guitarist Etienne Sarthou (AqME), aren't from the seraglio, Deliverance isn't a black metal band quite like the others, attempting the alliance between black art and sludge to end up with something viscerally icy and tormented.

The French finally have their rightful place within a genre that has long demonstrated its ability to evolve, to break free of rules, to cross borders. After "Chrst", which tortured many, the band gives birth to "Holocaust 26:1-46", which succeeds in sounding even blacker than its predecessor while experimenting even more. The result is still as shivering, still as sharp, still as disembodied. Its discover is no less difficult, painful as the band refuses to compromise, never yielding to the sirens of ease. We can even say that they don't even try to help the listener with this 'Saturnine' who opens this work. Austere, this beginning has something of a long and petrified wandering where beauty has been set aside. With a sickly harshness, the vocals of Peter participates with this suffering tempo to the erection of a decor both twilight and eaten away by madness.

While 'Sancte Iohannes', the most Norwegian of the titles, spreads an icy blizzard in the gloomy corridors of a castle swallowed by the fog -although some details disturb this reading- it rarely takes the promised road. Thus, after a raging start, 'God In Furs' quickly tighten the handbrake, tracing a chasm in the ground, at the bottom of which germinates a funeral tablecloth. And what about 'The Gyres', whose introduction, nimbed with a Floydian psychedelia, seems to be vomited out of nowhere. The rest of the track goes back to the crawling and ramshackle force of 'Saturnine', which was used as a pattern for the album, before this voice drowned under a spectral halo reappears at the end of the track.

We cross it again a little further on in 'Holocaust...' which unravels the ankylosed rhythm of rusting polluted guitars until the last part which knits moments of death above an endless well. And if 'Makbenach' rekindles the flames of pure black metal, it's only to better then get lost in the unhealthy meanders of a haunted and contrite rock. Allaited, like its predecessor, to the bosom of religion, we can however guess that "Holocaust 26:1-46" uses this theme as a breeding ground to develop a more personal narrative whose six songs form the successive chapters.

In doing so, Deliverance continues to erect a building that belongs to him alone, which he corrupts with external cysts to finally spread a more austere darkness and palpitate with an even more black metal sap. - Official website

DELIVERANCE

HOLOCAUST 26:1-46

DEADLIGHT

BLACK METAL