SOUVENIRS D'UN AUTRE MONDE

I've seen black metal purists elsewhere react furiously to this charming debut full-length album from Alcest, since it does jettison an awful lot of what makes black metal, well, black metal. As well has presenting a dreamy, ethereal atmosphere without a hint of the dark misanthropy that characterises much black metal (such as Peste Noire, Neige's previous project), in terms of the actual music it doesn't sound especially metal at all. The walls of guitar noise are much closer to the lush soundscapes of My Bloody Valentine and the rest of the shoegaze crowd than to metal of any sort, and the calm, tranquil vocal delivery likewise distances the band from metal. As shoegaze goes this is alright, I suppose, especially when it incorporates a few stylistic ideas from post-rock/post-metal to expand the bounds of the genre a little, but it feels like much of this won't be that new or fresh to anyone who's already up on the original shoegaze wave of the late 1980s.