Dirge
Wings of Lead Over Dormant Seas

French band Dirge are according to their record label Equilibre masters at creating great works of arts from monotone sounds and musical ditches and so on. I agree on the monotone sentiment and slow and all of that. It is a masterpiece except for in every conceivable way, unless of course that was hidden on the second disc we did not get which contains one sixty minute song which happens to be the title track. But judging from the first disc I am not sure that will make much of a difference anyway.

Dirge paints a musical canvas of sounds, they do it from long streaks of monotony and some gruffy vocal tracks, but in most parts it is a musical desert landscape of instrumental sounds with the colours mixed on a palette of sand. A Musical desert with some remote oasis but generally it is dry and sandy, sand that gets into the clothes and the shoes and itches everywhere while you are walking. Still it works quite well as a background source of noise while you are working on something like for instance painting a desert landscape on a canvas of slime.

The tracks are long and contains of long parts of dry landscapes just waiting for the rain to fall and bring new life into them. But it is a rain that never arrives and the hour snails by really slowly when you listen to it, if you don’t pay any attention to it and allow it to be a background source of noises the hour passes much more quickly. As a void-filler Dirge is amazing but I would never want to see them live, to hear that monotone music so loud would be devastating.

I think that the best way to describe this album is like this: Imagine yourself being in a desert with many sand dunes and the sun gazing mercilessly from a cloudless sky, there is no wind to cool you down and the loose sand gets into your shoes and your clothes while you walk. It is also a tough walk considering the loose sands, and like the sun, the heat, the sweating leading to dehydration and nothing to drink, the sand in your shoes wasn’t enough there are strange gruffing and monotonous sounds coming down from the skies making the walk even worse. And when you eventually find your long sought after oasis you notice that the water is poisoned, but you are so thirsty that you drink it anyway. When you then walk away your body is broken down from the inside from the poison you just drank and as you don’t have a small vial of antidote you die a gruesome, slow death. It is exactly like that to listen to this album.

This means that at best I would describe this band a bit monotonous but perhaps with some imagination you might be able to conjure up an idea of atmosphere or something like it, but in reality this is an album that is lethally boring. So, get it if you like to drink deadly poison.

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