OGIVES: La Mémoire Des Orages (PROGRESSIVE ROCK,Others): review / opinion to read on Music Waves

To say that the Belgian band Ogives lacks audacity on their debut album, "La Mémoire des Orages", would be an understatement. Launching a career with a double album is already unusual, but when the music dares to blend classical, rock, doom, contemporary and electronic music, it becomes downright rare. Add to this the sheer number of performers (eight) and the wide-ranging instrumentarium used, with flutes, sax and trombone rubbing shoulders with two drum kits, among others. Lyrical or religious songs rub shoulders with more rocking ones, when they don't turn to screaming. Finally, poetic lyrics, offering the listener several interpretations depending on his or her sensitivity, take the place of lyrics on tracks flirting for the most part with the 10-minute mark.

Complexity is not a guarantee of quality, and many bands have lost themselves in frivolous concepts or abstruse music that flatters their ego more than it is interesting. Fortunately, this is not the case with Ogives, who manage to reconcile depth and pleasure. For any music lover with an inquisitive mind, "La Mémoire des Orages" is one of those rare discoveries that don't come along every year. The compositions are a blend of contemporary audacity, baroque traditions (in the artistic sense of the term) and cyclical melodies, succeeding in the double challenge of always surprising the listener without ever losing him. Beautiful melodies alternate with dissonance, elegiac moments are brutally interrupted by the most savage bestiality, yet the whole thing seems perfectly natural.

All in all, the album is tinged with a great melancholy, reinforced by the poetry of lyrics whose content is not the happiest. The often slow tempo allows a disenchanted gentleness to settle in, in which vocals play an important role. If we had to define the performance of the two female singers, Marie Billy and Zoé Pireaux, sometimes joined by their male counterparts in their flights of fancy, sometimes in unison, sometimes in counterpoint, there's no doubt that angelic would be the appropriate term. Their harmonious voices perfectly execute the perilous and not-so-perfect lines imposed by the score, regularly provoking a pleasant stir in the listener.

In the midst of this ocean of gentleness, furious passages are delivered to the insanity of two raging drums, a bass with doomsday depth, a guitar with aggressive riffs and tortured saxes. The darkness and violent despair that set in are reminiscent of King Crimson or Van der Graaf Generator in their darkest wanderings, when not flirting with the underworld of dark doom or discordant death metal. Nonetheless, the dissonance is mastered and the contemporary audacity sufficiently sprinkled to be tolerated by unaccustomed ears.

Swaying its audience between elegiac moments, angelic voices and infernal fury, Ogives delivers with "La Mémoire des Orages" an album whose charm is matched only by its intelligence, and which every curious music lover must listen to. - Official website

OGIVES

LA MÉMOIRE DES ORAGES

SUB ROSA

PROGRESSIVE ROCK