Conor Fynes 'Heretoir' - Heretoir (6/10)

Lately in the black metal scene, there has been a recent sound developing. Arguably brought to the limelight by the French band Alcest, this style- called 'blackgaze' by some- has been picking up some speed over the past couple of years. Taking depressive black metal and pairing it with the ethereal sounds of shoegaze music and post-rock, many of the bands have been quite successful in giving that otherwordly, melancholic sound that has drawn me to this budding style. In this sense, German blackgaze band Heretoir is nothing I haven't heard before; anyone who has heard a depressive black metal band with post-rock undertones will know what to expect here. While this band's sound is anything but original though, it doesn't stop Heretoir from creating a moving album that is quick to tug on one's heartstrings.

Although the band has released a couple of minor releases before this, this is going to be the first time most people have ever heard of Heretoir. Here, the sound is close in tone, production and mood to bands like Lantlos and Coldworld. Instead of an overtly dark, malefic approach that much black metal seems to take, Heretoir's sound instead shifts towards the contrary. The feeling of despair and melancholia is here, but there is a great sense of hope in the sound. The songwriting is fairly generic and predictable, but it does work very well. In terms of the band's composition here, the direction and approach of each track is fairly straightforward; a few measures into each idea, one can generally figure out where each eeb and flow of Heretoir's sound will occur. Instead, the beauty here is in the way Heretoir arranges sounds beautifully together, taking some overdone but effective chord progressions and layering them with otherworldly guitar tones and flourishes.

In terms of mixing and execution of the music, Heretoir gives a fairly mixed bag here. On one hand, the otherwise low fidelity of the mixing is amped up with plenty of detail, especially in the clean guitar tones. Things can be heard clearly, and it does sound like a fairly professional release. A negative side of this is the drums, which sometimes sound like they really work for the album's heavier moments (especially the album's highlight track 'Weltschmerz'), but otherwise feel feel incredibly basic and bland. The vocals here range from a suicidal shriek to spoken word ambiance and some pleasant clean vocals that might sound a little too similar to Alcest's Neige.

A beautiful album to listen to in any case, Heretoir still feels as if they are paying homage to the pioneers, rather than attempting to move past them.

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.