HERETOIR — Heretoir (review)

HERETOIR — Heretoir album cover Album · 2011 · Atmospheric Black Metal Buy this album from MMA partners
3.5/5 ·
Vehemency
How ever generic it’s to fuse post-rock and shoegaze influences to black metal by now, the recent release batch by Northern Silence Productions offered a great deal of worthwile releases from this certain field, a field that blossoms thanks to a few great French innovators that triggered the flood of a thousand copycats. Much to Heretoir’s good, their eponymous debut album doesn’t follow those footsteps too closely, albeit the influence of Alcest, Agalloch and Amesoeurs shines through as bright as daylight. These fifty minutes are laden with delicate melodies and wide reverb - the wistful atmosphere is maintained successfully throughout the album even if there are some fairly weaker links in the whole, like ”To Follow the Sun” and the self-titled ending track that quite don’t rise to the level of the other sonorous tracks.

A lot of space has been given to purely instrumental passages, like e.g. ”Retreat to Hibernate” - one of the highlight tracks - imply, starting with despondent chords and turning into a rather odd and original ending, like the protagonist of this album - yes, this album flows smoothly as a consistent journey - was starting to lose his mind. A few ambient interludes are in present too, luckily not dominating with too long running times, no, they are swift moments before it’s time to bring the usual instrumentation back to the game. It’s not until ”Weltschmerz” when the black metal roots are truly visible: the song is filled with blastbeats and tremolo guitarwork, this track also belonging to one of the standout pieces on the album - not to forget the following ”Graue Bauten” and its ethereal clean vocals in the background, the more usual black metal screams on top.

Something to complain about resides in the drums that at times sound very programmed and at times real and detailed - just listen to that fine groove on the beginning of ”Retreat to Hibernate”. However it is, the drums could do better with a more realistic sound overall, as the somewhat mechanized sound doesn’t fit to the whole picture of atmospheric droning music so well. Other than that, there’s not much anything else to say when it comes to proper negative sides. No matter how unoriginal Heretoir’s debut is from the core, I find myself enjoying it greatly. Removing the few glitches and bringing more of those original moments to the music would make this at least a four star album, but for now I have to settle to a slightly ’worse’ rating. Definitely a recommendable album for those who enjoy the bands mentioned in the first paragraph.
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