Vehemency Eerie and distant, yet feisty. This kind of words pop up in my mind when listening to Borgne’s fifth full-length, a deadly cold assault of richly textured black metal that even leans a bit on industrial sound as the programmed drums, a true war machine here, rampage on. Think of the ghostly atmosphere summoned by Xasthur (who actually contributed the introduction track to this album) and Elysian Blaze but with the ferocity of later era Blut Aus Nord, and you have an general idea of Entraves de l'Âme.

It was the production that grabbed my attention the best at first: the album sounds huge and there’s a lot of layers that round up multiple synth and guitar tracks - there’s always something to discover from the ambiance of the album. Compositionally, we’re dealing with quite a diverse record, too, ”Die Trying to Take the Rope Off” is a good example, as the massive wall of distortion disappears in the latter half and acoustic guitars take the main role - not quite something that I would have expected, but it works very well. The album reeks of overall malicious atmosphere and succeeds in evoking pictures of sinister utter darkness.

Initially, I was about to give the album a somewhat negative rating, but after multiple spins I fail to think of any reasons why not to say it’s a rather favorable record - so remember to give this more than just a few listens and it will get better in time. Entraves de l'Âme is a strong whole with good total plaing time of 42 minutes and there’s enough compositional diversity to keep it interesting, and one of my only complaints go to the intro track: I find it completely unnecessary that Malefic provided the intro here because it doesn’t really fit together with the rest of the album. It’s good, but would fit so much better on a Xasthur album.