Year of No Light: Six Dudes, a Lot of Noise, and Meh to Show for It
Droning, crashing, building tower after tower of riffs and choking the oxygen out of the very atmosphere you breathe while you listen to it – these would seem to be the objectives behind French post-metallers Year of No Light’s second full-length, Ausserwelt (Conspiracy). The Bordeaux six-piece featuring three guitars, two drummers, one bassist and a host of keyboard and electronics that can come from just about any of them present four extended tracks to make up the album’s 48-minute runtime, the shortest being just over nine and a half minutes long, and the longest, “Hiérophante,” clocking in at 13:13.
With six people in the band and the most recognizable figure being guitarist Shiran Kaidine (also credited with vocals, though there aren’t any words on the album) of Monarch!, who came aboard after Year of No Light’s 2006 debut, Nord, it’s the wall of sound that’s the star on Ausserwelt. It would almost have to be. Throughout “Perséphone I,” “Perséphone II,” “Hiérophante” and closer “Abbesse,” it’s the full-on tonal weight the band crafts that makes the record memorable, if not necessarily the songs themselves, which are instrumental, given toward stretches of ambience and, frankly, going for something entirely different than catchy hooks or lead lines. In a way, Year of No Light have so many spontaneous elements in their music – the effects, the electronic noises – that they can’t really come out of Ausserwelt sounding like anyone but themselves, but that said, what they’re doing isn’t really all that original.
It’s a kitchen sink approach. Two drummers, Bertrand Sebenne and Mathieu Mégemont, provide ample crash and thud, somehow managing to stay less busy-sounding than either the Melvins or Kylesa – perhaps it’s that each of them is also responsible for some sort of noise element – and Kaidine, Pierre Anouilh and Jérôme Alban on guitar give the songs enough thickness so that even when they’re not trying to be heavy, they are, but Ausserwelt feels like the band is trying too hard. Tribal drums behind ambient guitar lines in “Perséphone II?” Yes, Year of No Light sound like Year of No Light when they do it, but it’s not like it’s never been done. And with three guitar players playing tones so deep I don’t know why they even have a bassist, but Johan Sebenne also adds to the considerable electronics/noise mélange, so I guess he keeps busy one way or another. Personally, I say get another bassist and have two. Why not just make Year of No Light two bands put together? I’m not even kidding.
Put a screaming dude over Ausserwelt and you pretty much get an Isis record, but the band does have plenty to offer fans of ultra-heavy, ultra-dense atmospheric metal. I will not (je réfuse!) call Year of No Light experimental, because at this point everything they’re doing musically has been well established as a genre trope, and though on one level I enjoy how uncompromisingly crushing “Hiérophante” is at its most doomed, I don’t see myself returning to Ausserwelt for repeat listens, if only because the impression I get from the music is of a band making an effort to find a niche for themselves instead of honestly explore their creative whims. I’m not going to say Year of No Light are bad at what they do, because they’re not, and Ausserwelt is a well-made, thoughtful record that I’m sure is (rightly) going to earn the band much respect in the international heavy underground, I’m just not feeling it.
Tags: Bordeaux, Conspiracy, France, Year of No Light
