Cenotaphe “Chimères” LP Coming Soon

COMING SOON!

Cenotaphe “Chimères” LP
ANTI-GOTH 764

(Description by J. Campbell)
From the celestial reaches of the “Empyrée” MLP, released in 2019, and the lonely summit of their 2020 debut full-length “Monte Verità,” Cenotaphe’s new album, “Chimères,” is a crashing descent toward the terrestrial plane. Whereas the band’s previous work explored modes of transcendence, on this album Cenotaphe wade through the murky depths of the human experience with all its earthly misery and despair, the tragic toiling and endless vicissitudes of life in the world among men, through which one must persist and persevere, trudging onward with indefatigable fervor. It is an appeal to the physicality of existence and the perpetuation of ancestral ideals through maternal sacrifice and paternal strength, cutting a path through the ephemeral state of living, in the cold shadow of ever-encroaching death. Formed 10 years ago, Cenotaphe have quietly issued a handful of releases with which they’ve established themselves at the forefront of the contemporary French black metal underground. Fog, who plays all the instruments on the album, began writing and recording these tracks in 2020, working on them for the next four years as vocalist Khaosgott pored over the lyrics. Musically and thematically, “Chimères” strikes a tone more forceful and direct than the band’s earlier recordings. The chimera—a Greek mythological beast depicted as a hybrid fusion of a snake, lion, and goat—represents the all too human pursuit of hopeless and illusory dreams, and the deranging delusion of utopias that burn brightly in the minds of men but disappear beneath their touch like a mirage. The muscular, melodic riffs of the songs on “Chimères” are at once assertive and emotive, coalescing to conjure an atmosphere that is dense, anguished, and on edge. In keeping with Fog’s musical composition, Khaosgott eschews to some extent the evocative poetics of his earlier writing in favor of a voice that is elemental and earnest amid a vortex of grief, capturing what it means to be at the center of the wheel—equidistant from son and father—turning eternally through the seasons of mortality; to gaze despairingly out at the world, yet look fearlessly inward, through the unknowable and unnamable darkness within, and emerge stronger; to tend earthly gardens, tilling the blood-soaked soil suffused with the ashen bones of ancestors and shielding emergent seedlings from the pests and vermin gathered at the perimeter.

ETA: Early July