Vehemency
Although I'm usually some sort of a sucker for raw sounds that can be on the verge of noise, sometimes I do think that a noisy production can weaken even black metal. Belgian Ghremdrakk's second album, Je m'exalte, belongs to this category although it’s compositionally beautiful.
Musically, Je m'exalte provides almost astral sounding occult black metal, a nice mixture of aggression and a hint of sadness ("De Asceet") with an insane sounding vocalist. All the songs are relatively long, from 6 to 9 minutes, so Je m'exalte is not an easy bite. The compositions are epic and they have bombastic culminations with synths (”Servitor, Servitor”). The drumming style is quite unique in Ghremdrakk: instead of general blast beats, the drummer seems to favor a sort of a death metal blast beat, which is a nice feature.
However, the snare drum and especially the crash symbals top all the other instruments quite strongly. This results in an album where the drums dominate everything else, and it becomes almost cacophony when the drummer uses the previously mentioned blast beat style. I’m fine with this in small doses, but sometimes it does get irritating, and I would love to be there producing this album and turning down the volume knob of the drums just a bit. Luckily the instruments are enough apart from each other so a careful listener won’t miss the guitar riffs, for example. Just don’t try to listen to this album without headphones, I’d say...
With a production of this sort, it is not easy to go through a 62 minute album concentrated the whole time, even though the last 6 minutes of Je m'exalte include a beautiful piano only song. The compositions are good and Je m’exalte is far from a bad album. I would still favor the previous full-length Sterrenpracht, though, due to the more considerate production and also slightly better compositions (such epics as ”De Sfeer Van Daath” from Sterrenpracht are hard to beat after all).