Anhédonie (Weird Truth Productions)

 This long awaited second full length album (and fifth release) of these French masters of Doom is finally out. Three years after the releasing of “Slow Transcending Agony”, an album that surprised the worldwide Doom Metal audience with its extreme blend of Funeral Doom and Death Metal, the band presents five new tracks of varied, original and solidly composed Doom/Death Metal of the highest caliber… After a short atmospheric intro, the crawling riffs fill your speakers with its immense notes and majestic cadency, creating crushing and dense atmospheres of incredible weight, complemented by the versatile and extreme vocalization of Marquis (Funeralium, Bethlehem), which certainly contributes with the whole album’s variety with his magnificent mix of clean, whispering, shrieky and growling voices… The drum work here is also remarkable, providing a wide range of tempos, from ultra slow Funeral Doom Metal passages, semi blasting mid paced Death Metal parts to even some quite Black Metal inspired structures, all these constant mix of styles is always balanced by an accurate guitar, bass and vocal work, making of this album an amazingly eclectic opus. If you still haven’t a clear idea of how this album sound like, let me give you a slight one; take the densest moments of Evoken, the obscurest mid paced passages of Incantation, the most blackish parts of Bethlehem’s first two albums and put them together into a concrete blending machine… are you getting a picture? But even when you can definitely heard some reminiscences of the above mentioned bands; “Anhédonie” is far from sounding remotely unoriginal. With this album Ataraxie definitely stands out from the majority of today’s Doom/Death and Funeral Doom Metal bands, its exquisite, magnificent yet obscure, brutal mix of influences and personal visions makes of “Anhédonie” a highly recommendable album, not only for the Doom Metal audience, but for anyone into the most eclectic and obscure side of Doom, Death or even Black Metal… (AP)