Alcest, "Spiritual Instinct" Review

Album: Spiritual Instinct

Year Released: October 25, 2019

Genre: Post-Metal/Shoegaze

Tracks: 6

Length: 44:22

Label: Nuclear Blast

Alcest, is a band orginally from France and have been active in the music world since 2005. This band is characterized by its atmospheric sounds, mellow melodies and the heavenly voice of vocalist Neige. Since childhood, he always dreamed about a "Fairy Land", a landscape of shapes, colors and sounds that doesn't inhabit this earthly plane, but in his mere imagination. Since then, Alcest's music has been influenced by those dreamlike experiences of reverie and incomprehension that can only be expressed through music. However, although it is a band that nowadays has acoustic settings, delicate enveloping voices like an echo and catchy guitar riffs, it must be emphasized that their project started alone as a work dedicated to black metal. It was not until 2001 that they published their first demo.

This new album in particular, we can see the strength and subtlety that has always characterized Alcest. We can find a very well elaborated drum ornament, the perfect times between the cymbal and bass set are accentuated in an enveloping and face-to-face way in every song. The album has a total of 6 songs perfectly done. We can see the meticulous work that has been made in each of its subjects. Neige's heavenly but hellish voice is something unique that we can only hear in a band like Alcest. These pioneers of Post-metal, black-metal, shoegazing and alternative metal are geniuses of the genre. We will be able to see combinations and instrumental ups and downs that form a perfect balance between the dark, the spiritual and the unknown nostalgia.

In each of the songs on the album we are going to perceive the very characteristic aspects of Alcest. Heavy riffs, melodies that repeat with constant speed and brilliant serenity. They have revoked their beginnings since we again come across with authentic songs that manifest themselves with rudeness and subtlety. We will find an organic drum, emotional guitars and ghostly voices. Alcest, manages to express through their songs the constant struggle of the human being with its inner-self, we can distinguish this in a wonderful way once Neige screams with pain and longing for an uncertain paradise and also manifests hope and loneliness in his silences and voices that generate a trance with full calm.

He expresses anguish and hope for something incongnished. Each piece of music on this record is unique without a doubt. We will also achieve ourselves with a powerful and repetitive blast-beat that together with the enveloping wails of Neige's voice, we will be able to perceive musically a ghostly and poetic manifestation. A work that is merely well accomplished, where the songs have a perfect duration to enjoy in every aspect the elements that Alcest wants to show the world.

In conclusion, Alcest has shown us the great talent that each of the musicians has. They combine specters between the dark and heterogeneous beauty. Alcest has been weaving their way between melodies, sublime choruses and the spiritual instinct that elevate the human being to a paradisiacal plane and subject of emotions; this can only be expressed through the music that these pioneers of Shoegaze manifest. Here is a piece of the song: "Les jardins de minuit" translated into English:

My non-human parts
Mix with the heart
Of the sleeping blue water

In the midnight gardens
Where time has stopped

Spiritual instinct
Give me the strength
To embrace
The harshnesses of this world