Espectres by Helevorn is, according to the band themselves;
based on Hauntology, described first by Jaques Derrida and after by the philosopher Mark Fisher. He wrote “The Ghosts of My Life”, an amazing book where he describes the ‘slow cancellation of future’, and a lot of great concepts about the specters and the absences. How they make us what we really are. Is a fantastic concept to write a Doom Metal album isn’t it?”
Too which I reply: ‘Yes, yes it is.’
Because, dear reader, the truth of the matter is that Espectres by Helevorn is a fantastic album about a fantastic concept and easily the best of an already stellar career for the Mallorca Masters of Mediterranean Doom.
If you’re a regular visitor to the Black Metal Archives, you’ll know that I don’t usually go in for the technical details when it comes to the music on offer, as I’m an amateur musician at best that wouldn’t know a bridged 12th chord if it walked up and punched me in the balls. What I look for in a record is how it makes me feel. After all, that’s what music is supposed to do to you. Make you feel. And Espectres does that in spades.
It reaches inside you and pulls all of your emotions from your soul, leaving you an empty husk when it has finished. It is a vampire that feeds on the desolate sensations that live within all of us, and it extracts these from you with some of the most hauntingly beautiful pieces of music, that float ethereal like around you, taking you into a lovers embrace, before exposing you to the apocalypse that threatens to swallow us all.
So, yeah, it’s pretty fucking deep shit.
This comparision is going to sound weird, as they are two entirely different genres of music, but for me, Helevorn – and especially Espectres – provoke the same sense of ‘All is lost’ as Gaerea. I don’t mean that in a bad way either, everyone needs to be able to lose themselves in the futility of life once in a while and get swept along by something that is bigger than them, and I don’t think there are two bands around at the moment that do that better than Helevorn and Gaerea. It’s just the way they do it is different.
Where as Gaerea bludgeon the life out of you with visceral violence, Helevorn use an auditory panoramic view for you to get lost in. It is bleak, it is barren, it is brutal and it is cold, but most importantly, it is beautiful no matter which direction you look.
Espectres has been garnering rave reviews among the underground press, and I am not going to differ in heaping praise upon it, because Espectres isn’t an album. It is a sensory experience on every single level imaginable.
