Alcest – Les Voyages de l'Âme (2012)

Flying high on the success of their classic “Écailles de Lune”, Alcest has managed to tour the world and still found time to record “Les Voyages de l'Âme”. In this new release, the band efficiently re-hashed “Écailles de Lune”, toned down the Black Metal aspect of things, and still delivers 8 brilliantly atmospheric tracks. However, the ‘originality’ or ‘something different’ factor is lacking a bit with this release.

Opening with “Autre Temps”, Alcest makes it very clear that their sound is untouched and delivers a very ethereal track. The vocal harmonies are as heavenly as possible and they beautifully contrast the powerful guitars. The bass guitar and drums are also very well incorporated and perfectly mixed to be in the background of the atmospheric elements.

Keeping the momentum going, “Là Où Naissent les Couleurs Nouvelles” delivers waves of magical guitar sections again accompanied by clean vocals in French. The Black Metal shrieks make their appearance as a backing vocal track at first before taking front place and deliver their powerful emotional payload. The very atmospheric “Les Voyages de l'Âme’ is the most emotional track of this release and our favorite one as well. It perfectly mixes aggressive guitar sections, elaborate drumming, emotional vocals, and very slick melodic passages.

In a typical Alcest fashion “Nous Sommes l'Emeraude” is excellent, but sounds very similar to stuff in “Écailles de Lune”. This immediately makes us wonder is Alcest is running out of ideas. Also the aggressive “Beings of Light” has that familiar déjà vu feeling due to its fast paced-to-ethereal approach to things. We also started to notice that the album is considerably more ‘dreamy’ than the previous ones. While this is not entirely bad, we kind of got turned off by this after the 6th song.

After the two minute atmospheric track “Havens”, we have our second favorite track of this release “Summer’s glory”. In this song Alcest again takes advantage of their superior atmospheric skills and crafts some pretty solid guitar riffs. The clean vocals are as divine as always, but like we mentioned before, by this point they got a bit stale. Maybe some more harsh vocals or no-vocals would offset the balance and keep things interesting.

Overall, “Les Voyages de l'Âme” is not a bad album by any means but shows Alcest somewhat losing its magic. The constant déjà vu feeling is a lingering element that weakens this release. We also think that while the clean vocals are magical and create a very ethereal effect, they are also overdone in this release making it ‘extra’ dreamy to a fault. We like that the Black Metal stuff is being phased off, but there is the need to do something new or at least less repetitive to replace them. Alcest is a pretty good band and has shown great creativity, we hope that their next release greatly improves on this and reaches (and surpasses) “Écailles de Lune”.

Release: January 31st, 2012

Country: France