Review: Les Chants du Hasard – Les Chants du Hasard
The French one-man project Les Chants du Hasard drops an imaginative and explorative debut of the very same name, a metal album with none of the usual metal instruments. Hasard bridges classical music with black metal in a form much purer and more challenging than the leagues of symphonic black metal bands who have attempted a similar thing.
Much like the era of classical music that Hasard seems to be in dialogue with, there is a conscious and tight governance on the pace and changing intensity of the album. The second Chant: Le Soleil is a prime example of this. The song begins with sparse instrumentation and short bursts of strings accompanied by the more choral and melodic vocals. Towards the middle of the song, we get stronger melodies emerge, accented by thick orchestral layers, as the subtle chimes evolve into symbol crashes. All the while though, towering cleans create a heavenly atmosphere. After this ascension, the song descends to a more hellish landscape as the tortured, warped growls reappear alongside primal percussion and a return of scarcity. In a song like this, Hasard puts on display an acute attention to the over-arching contrast that his music creates, but also a show of control as he stops these very different sounds from clashing and instead uses them together to engineer an ebb and flow between his peaks and his lulls.
Following on from this idea, an integral feature of the way this album manipulates atmosphere is the dynamic vocal arrangements. The clean vocals are not just that but have an added spiritual quality to them. In songs like L’Homme, towards the four-minute mark we get, deep, distant vocal chants as the orchestra lowers their town to a softer, darker composition. The vocals here, but also in many other parts of the album, feel almost ritualistic. Also, the mixing of both the guttural and clean vocals are never permitted to overpower the band, and so bleed into the overall monolith of sound in a fashion also similar to that of rituals. Also, in L’Enfant we see Hasard using his voice to trace tonal shifts as the viciousness of his screams mirror the intensity, and climactic moments are met with soaring harmonic vocals. We also have on this song one of the most eerie and desolate moments of instrumentation which is paired with dual tracked growls that uncomfortably distort.
In terms of the great test of Hasard’s experiment, to conjure a heaviness with the classical elements that match traditional metal instrumentation, he clearly succeeds. This is shown in moments like the huge, crushing violins in Le Soleil, or in the last section of the album as La Vieillesse fades out with booming horns and pounding percussion that punctuate the orchestral power. The closing statement of this album is what most will remember most vividly, and the statement here is that even without traditional metal instrumentation, Hasard does not fall short of the ferocity of his musical peers. The only gripe I could point to with this project would be perhaps that the abrasive elements are too over-weighted, and Hasard could have utilised the classical elements to create a greater and lengthier amount of softer, more beautiful moments to really drive home the powerful juxtaposition that this fusion had such potential for.
Overall though, Hasard does a wonderful job at marrying these elements, and I would recommend this project to anyone who seeks to challenge their aural buds beyond the parameters of standard extreme metal.
3.5/5
Highlights: Le Soleil, L’Enfant
