I started a lot of posts about bands who I once felt were incapable of making a flawless album, who have then gone on to do it anyway. I never finished those posts, because I’m no longer a subscriber to the opinion that critics need to criticise. There is way too much music available and accessible to spend time on putting down someone’s work. Best let the ones who like it like it and keep my subjectivity to myself. I still love the bands, I’ll still go see them if the opportunity presents itself, and I still want them to do well.
That said, let’s talk about Alcest, who REALLY haven’t made a bad album in the decade+ that I’ve been following them. This is a reality that I only accepted recently when I moved on from Souvenirs d’un Autre Monde and Ecailles de Lune – the two albums I know by heart – and decided to more mindfully listen to the four albums and one EP that they released after. Sure, I’d listened to Les Voyages de l’Ame, Shelter, Kodama, Spiritual Instinct and Le Secret several times over shortly after their release, but never with the same presence I reserved for the first two releases. That is until this year.
I wonder if it’s because Alcest and I have walked a similar evolutionary path, and while Souvenirs and Ecailles are what spoke to me back in 2010, it’s Voyages and Kodama that resonate with me today. I’ve been vibing more ‘heavy’ these past few months, and dreampop isn’t doing it for me (shoegaze is fine, as always). I’m really getting into music with more WEIGHT. It’s nothing new – I’ve been loyal to HANL and Jesu for a while – BUT metal and scream vocals were a different beast.
Yet here I am today, talking about Alcest while listening to Møl and I KNOW I would not have been able to appreciate the latter 5 years earlier (so it’s convenient that they only came into existence 4 years ago…) when I was more into the sweetness and light, and not yet ready for the acid and lead. It’s not that surprising either – the appeal of shoegaze was always the ‘beautiful noise’ and the ‘search’ for a delicate melody under waves of distortion. But I don’t want to float anymore, I want to sink under the weight of noise.
Back to Alcest. I maintain they’re masters of this technique, though from memory I can recall metal message boards being vehemently opposed to the change in style from Amesoeurs. I can understand that perspective today, in the light of my own take on their debut but I wonder if that view has changed (I’m too lazy to go find out). Shelter, Voyages and Kodama sound different but I couldn’t tell you why. When they came out, I lost the hooks they hid in their tracks regardless of how often I listened to them and I’d go back ‘home’ to Souvenirs and Ecailles. That’s OK – I wasn’t ready for ‘Les Jardins de Minuit’ then. But I am today.
This is the kind of evolution I can get behind, and this is is why I come back to albums I may have originally ignored, dismissed or – if I was still an on trend critic – been non-positive about. I have the internet’s content saturation to thank for my liberation from my obligation to comment on albums at the time of release. We need to grow, ruminate and then revisit. We’re not always ready for a sound at the moment it comes out. Maybe we feel the tickle of an emotion we can’t place. The unfamiliarity makes it so we can’t process what we hear. Then maybe years later it ‘clicks’ and suddenly, everything makes sense.
Full disclosure: I’m still not ready for Sunbather.