Les Chants De Nihil "Propagande Erogene" CD

Frenetic yet Atmospheric melodic French Black Metal.
second album is composed of 9 tracks with their own feeling. Jewelcase CD with 12 pages booklet with lyrics.

Quite often with most musicians and bands, the comparison standard by which all their work should be judged is the second album release: it's the recording that expresses the band's style and original intentions to the full and is a guide to what listeners can expect on future albums (or the next album at least ... and maybe the next after that). The second album for Les Chants de Nihil "Propagande érogène" is a very solid and artfully crafted work: the trio play nearly all instruments and sing on most songs apart from "Fête de la Fédération" which features vocalist Jerry plus four guest vocalists. The band's essential black metal style is dominant throughout but there are death metal influences in some of the drumming and the songs veer in a strongly melodic and alternative-mainstream direction.
There is a definite narrative all the way through the album which escalates through "Fête de la Fédération" and reaches its peak in "Le Verdicte". A sexual comparison can be made in the way the music generally rises, hits its climax and holds for some time, then tails off. Each song reveals considerable care and craft in their creation, and the music is layered in ways that can superficially remind some listeners of Deathspell Omega, though LCdN has considerable way to go before they can equal DSO in writing structurally complex riffing and rhythm sequences. The upshot though is that LCdN's music is comparatively more straightforward and this album is an easy ride for those who miss the other French band who haven't released any original material since 2012.
The music becomes a lot more melodic by the fourth song with the pace slowing down generally apart from sudden brief spurts of blast-beat aggression. Les Reines de Verre" ("Queens of Glass") features as much moody bass-driven blues melody and plaintive piano as it does ragged BM guitar, stop-start drumming and cynical vocal, and the song's coda takes a side-step into a noir-ish mini soap opera and melodrama. The multi-voiced "Fête de la Fédération" presents a darker Gothic-flavoured mood in an otherwise straightforward black/death fusion. After an ambient interlude, we're back in business with the title track, all bristling with spiky melodic BM guitar, jagged rhythms, an unexpected detour into acoustic-strings contemplation and some frankly laughable male-choir singing. Perhaps the band errs through overkill here, and listeners might need time out after the track, but at least we can say the musicians are determined not to fall into the no-go filler zone if they can help it. The rest of the album ("Du Feu et des Étoiles" / "Of Fire and Stars") is a solid workout with ever more layered and complex music that hardly relents in pace.
This album is a very exhaustive experience and if you're going to listen to the whole work all the way through, you might consider cutting your listening experience in half, with the cut between tracks 5 and 6 or between tracks 6 and 7, for the first few spins before you think of undertaking the 54-minute marathon. The guys definitely don't do things by halves: if the maximalist approach is needed, not only do they take that as the first resort but they push it for all it's worth. Of course this means if you get left behind early on, the distance between you and the musicians only increases as they continue on relentlessly; there are not many moments in the album where the music quietens or its dense quality and intensity ease.
The best moments of the album are when the band is in unabashed blast-beat blackened doom/death mode. Those parts where the musicians include found sound recordings or delve into a more theatrical direction can be histrionic and at odds with the grim, unrelenting mood. (The theatre may be deliberate, an example of the band's sense of humour.) On the whole though, the trio have given the album everything they've got. With the passage of time, "Propagande érogène" might be considered one of the band's best albums and LCdN themselves a key band in the second (third?) wave of French BM.

Sample: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...