Comes in a deluxe 3 part CD digipak with an 8-page booklet including lyrics, and a picture printed CD
12 years after their last release “Je Suis Autrefois” , French Black Metal act EPHELES breaks the silence with their new offering “Promesses”.
A one hour spiritual journey carried by icy winds of despair, only guided by the melancholic and majestic hymns of this legendary duet formed by Malphas and Nephtys...
Almost exactly twelve years after their last album "Je Suis Autrefois", I can hardly believe the news … Epheles are BACK with their third (or fourth) album "Promesses"! Brothers Malphas and Nephtys more or less pick up where they left off with "Je Suis Autrefois", with Arctic-strength icy atmospheres, an elegant and polished yet still aggressive style of classic 1990s-era melodic BM and a sound so sharp it would cut straight through several layers of glass if you let it. Here on "Promesses" the duo opt for an almost cinematic soundtrack approach in composing and arranging their songs, with the result that the entire album seems less like a collection of songs and more like a continuous operatic drama depicting a spiritual journey and descent into hell. The musicians clearly don't care about pleasing an audience, however enthusiastic that audience may be – no, Malphas and Nephtys have made this album as an expression of their respective spiritual journeys at this particular time, and if it happens to resonate with their fans and others who happen to encounter "Promesses", that is a happy bonus for the duo.
Opening track "Les Souillures du Temps", one of the two long tracks exceeding the ten-minute mark, brings forth Epheles' icy cold style that manages at once to encompass an intimacy with listeners through the vocals (and creepy vocals they are too) and a spacious ambience that expands and goes far into infinite cavernous darkness. The melodic and ambient effects featured on "Les Souillures …" are so well placed and delivered with such delicacy that you cannot help but feel drawn irresistibly into the duo's dark, dark universe. Choirs of black angels (and perhaps demons) serenade your entry into this deeply immersive dimension, even as the cheap synth percussion (the only really major downside of Epheles' style) clatters at insane levels of intensity. The path into Hell was never so beautifully or carefully prepared before this album arrived and showed how evil could be so wondrously and dazzlingly rendered.
What follows "Les Souillures …" can be an ordeal to hear, with the cries of the damned being herded into darkness, and solid walls of grinding guitar pushing forward over which tremolo melodies play or rasping demon voices gloat or gabble among themselves. Riffs can be as harsh, rugged and raw as any produced by most self-respecting raw BM acts, even with as polished as a production as is found here. Reverb is used a lot (especially on the vocals, both lead and background) yet well not just to give depth and an epic cavernous scale to the music but also to maintain a distinct atmosphere of unearthly evil and menace, and of complete isolation and alienation from the outside world.
The second long track "Quel Âge a ce Visage", like "Les Souillures …", is a mini-opera in itself with short bursts of guitar machine-gun fire interspersed with spoken voice samples, distorted demon voices and passages of dark ambient synth wash. The song-writing may appear erratic with passages of music not consistent with one another in pace or even in style or approach, and transitions between pieces of music often being abrupt, but the song powers away with an alien energy and passion beyond ordinary human ability to understand, much less harness. After this track, the rest of the album continues its odyssey through blackness and hell, with intense and manic outbursts of jackhammer percussion and tremolo riffing ("Vieillir avec toi"), that leads into an unwelcome if not unexpected revelation in the closer "L'Eternel", a song that is consistent with the soundtrack nature of the music even as it comes close to blackened sludge doom and is rather more monotonous and less interesting than the rest of the album.
It's a long work and its story-like nature does demand a very long attention span but if you have an hour to spare and consider yourself resilient enough to last that long in glacial deep-freeze darkness, you will find incredible raw and bruising BM aggression and the most gorgeous if malevolent atmospheres on "Promesses". Everything on this album – the voices, the choirs, the spoken monologues, the music, the atmospheres – is crafted into a structure that holds steady and well, yet in parts can appear delicate, even fragile, and then suddenly in a split second explodes into fierce BM jackhammer frenzy. After a while, even the synth percussion seems appropriate though I still think one day Epheles should include some live drumming that would make their music even more powerful with stronger dynamic and tonal contrasts. If I had to pick one aspect of "Promesses" that Epheles have done really well, it is the way in which they weave voices – whether lead vocals, background vocals, samples of choirs, spoken monologues, recordings of crying women and babies – into the music to generate fear, horror and despair.
The two long tracks mentioned above are by far the best songs on the album but even they are best heard within this musical drama, with all its peaks of technical excellence, ferocity and malevolence, and troughs of sometimes boring and even bombastic monotony.
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