I hate writing negative reviews. I was always told, “If you don’t have anything to say, don’t say anything at all’. But I feel like fans of France’s long-running brutes Morgue need to be made aware of what’s happening on the band’s 6th album, their 4th after reforming in 2016 after breaking up in 2002, after releasing the utterly brutal, and to this day still gnarly, The Process to Define the Shape of Self-Loathing.
Last year’s Close to Complete Darkness showed that the duo of Jérôme Blandino and Max Lobier were still capable of delivering a serious
But then the 8-song, 35-minute effort was over, and I found myself checking to see if this was the right Morgue, or if there had been any significant lineup changes; there were not, and this was the right Morgue. It was, and there isn’t, and that makes this so disappointing.
It appears the duo has decided to branch out, develop, evolve, or whatever, as Herald the Dawn is a shell of what made Morgue so fuckin bludgeoning and brutal for their career up to this point, clean singing and all, but what we have is a tangible reining in of the brutality in favor of a more controlled, almost industrial, blackened sound.
A lighter guitar tone, distant rasped vocals, and a focus on more plodding, mid-paced riffs, with only a few instances of the band’s prior bludgeoning sound arising here or there. I get shades of Napalm Death’s shift on Fear Emptiness Despair, though not quite as full-on industrial or jarring, and notes of Anaal Nathrakh‘s more tame moments. Sound great on paper, but it’s not, I’m afraid.
It starts fairly promisingly enough with the opener “Vortex of Darkness”, where I am good with the moody first few bars to set a tone, then a blast beat, but then the song descends into a “Vortex of dullness”, with more black metal-based riffs, strange drum patterns, and echoey, distant howls. And then the rest of the album does it again for 7 more songs.
A few moments do briefly recall the band’s all-out savagery, but they are short-lived, like the opening moments of “To the Bitter End”, “The Last Supper,” or “The Abyss I Know”, where I’m hopeful the opener was an anomaly, but they both soon revert to this stammering, grooving industrial gait, and even when it does try to get a little more brutal later on, it’s just flat and forgetful.
And I hate to say it, but flat and forgetful is how Herald the Dawn hit me as a whole. The few moments of savagery are short-lived and just tease before the songs devolve into clinical, industrialish black metal. They try to be technical and dissonant at times (“Obedient to No Will”, “The Last Supper”, the downright terrible “Cursed Be”), but instead it comes across as sloppy and out of sync. The title track and closer “The Deserted Garden of Eden” (which could be a late era Satyricon song at times) are barely recognizable as the Morgue I know and love.
Sorry, Morgue, I love you guys, but this is a swing and a miss, and I hope it’s just a phase that’s out of your system now.
