A slightly longer wait than usual has decreed for this year the release of the new work by Alcest, a French duo who here present “Les Chants de l’Aurore” has taken over my gloomy start to summer. Our recipe is always the same, that blackgaze that Neige and Winterhalter contributed significantly to creating and of which they are still the greatest exponents, and could be hastily described as a soft and multifaceted mix of atmospheric black and an unspecified series of more accessible genres. Alcest’s music lives on atmospheres, in short, and after exploring its darkest aspects with the previous “Spiritual Instinct”, on this tour it is colored with bittersweet emotions, conveying a positive and sunny message made of airy, delicate melodies, to lull the listener in an embrace of fairy-tale and nostalgic warmth that smells of rebirth, be it emotional or spiritual. The duo paints colorful, dreamlike and calming scenarios, occasionally remembering the black component to enliven them with sudden, more turbulent bursts and thus mixing different emotional gradients in the space of each single song. The sporadic hardenings present in “Les Chants de l’Aurore” last just the time of a summer shower, acting as a counterpoint to languid and meditative textures while more restless notes make their way, from time to time, to instill a transitory tension in the compositions.
Although the general mood of “Les Chants de l’Aurore” is rather homogeneous, each track presents characteristic scents and thus tells a different story, relating in an almost symbiotic way to the rest of the album and its overall atmosphere, and it is precisely thanks to this continuous play of thematic and emotional references that “Les Chants de l’Aurore” hits the center of the target. From the proactive and therapeutic charge of the lush and joyful “Komorebi” – one of the peaks of the album – to the languid notes of the twilight “The Adieu”, in fact, the entire album radiates a spectrum of nuanced and welcoming sensations that showcase an undisputed mastery of the expressive medium and the ability to remain focused on the final goal, while giving different lights and colors to each episode. Therefore, while in the short “Reminiscence” the most impetuous component is set aside to make room for a sad and nostalgic piano melody, in other cases it is combined with more distant elements which accentuate the chromatic contrast. See, for example, the developments of “The Envol” and of “Améthyste” and their continuous interlocking game between tense phrasings, acoustic arpeggios with a relaxed tone and majestic, ecstatic, or making melodies summer Of “Flamme Jumelle” with its succession of placid atmospheres and sudden dreamy outbursts, or even the propulsive charge of the splendid “L’Enfant de la Lune” and the perfect balance between fury, accessibility and languid abandon.
Seven tracks for three quarters of an hour of intense and emotional music and then everyone goes home: “Les Chants de l’Aurore” arrives at the objective without beating around the bush too much but also without haste, taking the right time and exhibiting a very well-measured sound fullness and, above all, functional for the purpose. The French duo creates a work that, although it may trigger a certain feeling of deja vu in some passages, it proves to be rich, rounded and organic, and eschews flourishes and flourishes as an end in themselves to focus on an accessible but at the same time intimate and cathartic message. The kaleidoscope created by Alcest once again highlights the capabilities of emotional manipulation of the French, who despite often moving within a very precise and codified range of solutions, demonstrate that they know how to give new life to a well-known recipe even just by assembling its constituent elements in a different way.
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