LES VOYAGES DE L'ÂME

Alcest's third album finds the band treading water, showing little musical progress over their previous two releases and indicative of a backslide into producing albums and songs by rote formula. The mingling of post-rock and shoegaze guitar textures on here (with the black metal aspects once again scaled back) offers more or less nothing except pale imitations of musical passages already adequately performed on the first two albums, and on the whole there's no captivating, standout moments to elevate this above the status of pleasant but forgettable background music. Neige's skills as a producer and a multi-instrumentalist haven't waned, but in terms of compositions he seems to be in a creative rut this time around.