Over the years since the band’s inception, Alcest’s only consistent member, Neige, has reiterated his desire for the metal project to evoke a sentimental ‘otherworldly’ feeling. While shoegaze has always served somewhat as a guiding backbone for this vision throughout their discography, with ‘Shelter,’ they’ve finally taken a total plunge away from their ambient black metal history, diving headfirst into something much more glaring and entirely ethereal.
‘Shelter’ is a reverie of sorts with dreamy guitar notes and beautiful vocal melodies. It’s no wonder that Opale was chosen as the album’s single, and the captivating La Nuit Marche avec Moi is no different. Catchy in every sense of the word, you’ll even find yourself tapping your foot along to it, a motion previously thought impossible when listening to an Alcest song. While ‘pretty’ may be the most appropriate adjective to describe ‘Shelter’ as a whole, it unfortunately happens to lean too heavily on this hazy sound over the record’s entire duration.
The abundance of reverb used to create this dreamy soundscape is welcome and fresh at first – like opening a window on a cool summer’s morning – but this soon becomes wearisome, and at times you almost wish it would rain. The more post-rock tracks have impressively explosive climaxes, but the remnants from these eruptions take a little too long to reach the ground.
On Voix Sereines, the lingering feedback-laden outro draws out to a lengthy degree, taking you to the point of restless anticipation for the next track, a feeling you don’t want in an album that so inherently basks in its own gentle nature. It feels a bit one-sided and at times in these blissful moments, you almost wish Neige would slam his foot down on a heavy distortion pedal at the peaks to balance things out; raining on the cool summer’s breeze.
However, this extravagance is in control on songs like the album’s title track, as it gives off this nostalgic ‘Souvlaki’-era Slowdive feel; the silky enunciation of the French diction perfectly suiting the soft guitar airing all around them (no surprise, seeing as the the Slowdive frontman, Neil Halstead, features on Away). Songs like Shelter are perfect examples in showcasing Alcest’s growth, and perhaps now is as good a time as ever for newer fans to embrace this lighter sound as a gateway.
Even the album artwork acknowledges this; the dark silhouettes of the band’s former metal roots behind, reaching upwards into a brighter (and seemingly more hopeful) angle of the world, desperately trying to hold onto something. Whether this ‘something’ is worth grasping, however, is a fair question. Neige himself calls the closing track Délivrance ‘one of the best Alcest songs ever,’ hinting that, for him, his innate otherworldly vision has finally been fully realised. To a degree it has, but whether it’s a world in which the listeners can exist for the foreseeable future is the real concern.