In a musical climate that sees every rehearsal recording immediately pressed to vinyl and nationwide tours announced three days after a band's first Starbucks meeting, it's rare for a group to arrive on the scene without the gratuitous fanfare of messageboard masturbation or social media onslaughts. But Bosse-De-Nage did just that. Last year, on the backs of two willfully obscure 2006 demos and a 2010 LP that gathered recordings from 2007, they came seemingly out of nowhere to deliver one of the most intriguing, aristocratically depraved black metal recordings of 2011. That album, II, was released by San Francisco's Flenser Records, and the follow-up, III, comes courtesy of Profound Lore, a fitting home for the forward-thinking, shadowy quartet. With their last record, they peered into the mouth of madness. With its successor, they embrace it.
Bosse-De-Nage's idea of black metal is quite different from what the genre's granddaddies had in mind; we're not talking Bathory here, or even Horna. The messengers have changed, but the power remains. The band's take on the genre is closer to what Ash Borer or even Drudkh have done, in that their incorporation of outside elements comes across as organic and unassuming, and downright powerful at its peak. In BDN's case, many of the core values of black metal (nihilism, irreligion, anti-humanism) live on within their lyrics, the arching storylines and unnerving chronicles of the evil that men do. Existential anguish reigns, and nothing is okay.
Their affinity for shoegaze, post-hardcore, screamo, and even indie rock courses through each composition, weaving their influence around each blackened chord and tremolo clawing like silver threads spiking iron ore. Gentle, contemplative passages recall the French predilection towards summertime blues and verdant atmospheres, offering temporary flashes of respite on a difficult album. The album's centerpiece, "The God Ennui", is comparatively speaking, the most straightforward track on III, and the first three minutes of the song's nearly 11-minute running time are the most beautiful thing that the band has ever recorded. They seize Alcest mastermind Neige's formula, delving deeply into the sprightly, wistful "post-black" meanderings that the Gallic legions have kept such a stranglehold upon as of late, and allow it to fester ever so slightly. If the philosophers of Deathspell Omega covered one of Alcest's gossamer pseudo-black fairytales, the results might not lie too far from what Bosse-De-Nage are doing.
That's not to say that Bosse-De-Nage subscribe fully to the kinder, gentler side of what passes for black metal in 2012. There are plenty of moments of outright aggression, bleak, harrowing passages of unrelenting blasts, narrated by a chaotic, urgent voice that veers between angry wails and sparse, Slint-like sotto voce intonations depending on the lyrical bent. It's an intense listen, and a wholly cathartic one as well. The album's last track, "An Ideal Ledge", informs us that "there's a ledge somewhere set against a deadly precipice, which Spring's nostalgic winds never reach," then proceeds to take us out to the very edge and force us to look down into the yawning void between Scylla and Charybdis. If you know what's good for you, you'll dig your fingernails into the side of that mountain, and then let go.
