Unholy Matrimony
Croire, Décroître
9.2
Vladimir Cochet, unleash hell.
All of the apocalypse that can be had from a guitar-string ball the size of a planet unsnapping with sharp ends piercing, comes scarily close to being personified with a top-volume blare of Croire, Décroître. And at half-volume, what's been woven in is suddenly revealed as note-for-note threading; each riff, all notes of a chord being ever-so-slightly pushed through the eye of a needle and tied. Mr. Cochet's attention to detail is nothing short of heart-stopping.
So I've only dabbled in Mirrorthrone. Specifically, Carriers of Dust, and while there is evidence of the same one man responsible for both Unholy Matrimony and Mirrorthrone (as well as Weeping Birth, which I have been in search of, but to no avail), he does an admirable job of keeping these both salivary and separate entities. All have officially been dubbed Black Metal, yet there is still an obvious defining trait given to each one to avoid cloning. Such is the case with Matrimony, which lends itself to the crossover between the Black and the Death, meticulously.
Now, of my brush with UM's past, being pummeled and suffocated seems customary, and that's due largely in part to the droid at the helm of the programmed drumming = deadpan. The few tracks that I've heard had my head feeling as if I'd gnashed steel with my teeth, which is normally a high compliment, but it would've tried my patience at Croire's fifty-seven minutes. Lucky for my attention deficit that this year saw Matrimony loosen its grip and allow for "a general tempo slowdown and an increase in atmospheres heaviness", as Mr. Cochet so elegantly put it. While not the statement of the decade, it at least shows sonic ambition. So when there's just no room to breathe, is when the Limbonic Art comparisons do ring true but just aren't enough, and then the "heavy atmosphere" rears its ugly head with VoiVodian/Piggish features, a smirk of Rutan's fever and spit, and shadows of Tägtgren in Cochet's approach to riffing. The balance between harmony and discomfort is so carefully measured and so often crossing paths that the irresistible pockets of poison that it results in are the reasons why I can't seem to get enough of this album's call-and-response style. This Swiss dude's choice tactics (one of which includes penning lyrics solely in French) are sewn so tight into this tech-Black mad-riffery and scarily humane faux-drumming, that you gotta give him credit for carrying around the ten tons of DIYing it.
My final thought is that Croire, Décroître embodies the kind of caustic conflict that a lot of solo projects dream of, and very few wake up to. Sleep tight, motherfuckers.
