VI – De Praestigiis Angelorum
Well we had fun this week posting a bunch of stupid crap on Facebook to see how social media works. Our conclusion? It’s fueled by utter stupidity. As the activity climbed, we realized the most boring of us are more interested in crap memes and stupid, catchy phrases, which honestly we kind of took and altered after seeing other people say them, but no one notices derivation anymore. Then we thought on how much time we put into these, our reviews, the crux of our site, like so many sites, but ours our imbued with things you won’t find elsewhere. Namely, a keen sense of the actually good, and a complete destroying of the actually bad when it deserves it. That and some good old fashioned angst fer yuh youngins. Also unclear dialect references, and pomposity through large words except when it really matters. So we sat back after seeing the reaction to our posts on Facebook these past few days, those likes disappearing with them, and streams of salted eye bile flowed down our cheeks, and we left them there for so long they encrusted our face with crystalline hatred for all that is modern social media. And then, in the end, we realized we actually didn’t care, because we’d rather cater to a small number of true fans who like what we do instead of a bunch of occvltist lvsers looking for the next share-and-agree that they forget about anyway. What brought us out of our slump of disgust was this most excellent of black metal bands, VI. Back to the grind of obscurity, we say.
Here we have yet another modern marvel, an example of just how much good there is out there, waiting to be discovered, though these guys haven’t done such a bad job of it already. Around since only 2007, France’s VI consist primarily of members of the band Aosoth, with whom they did an absolutely killer split in 2010 called Angels Falling Down, two years after their debut EP De Praestigiis Daemonun. Through those two blips, VI has made a pretty recognizable name for themselves considering how hard it is these days with such few releases, and we suggest you check out those links to get an idea. After you’ve consumed those, it’s time to move on to this, their newest, De Praestigiis Angelorum.
Yet again we’re faced with a problem. We keep saying “hey, we should write an article about how French black metal is the best in the world,” and then we forget about it until something like this comes along. Seriously, cut the Norwegian crap, good bands aside France is the true bastion of black metal these days. Don’t think so ye follower of big bad sites with big bad likes and big bad reviews? Well, let VI’s De Praestigiis Angelorum prove otherwise and show what exactly we like to see around here for our black metal. They take the typical structure of the genre and improve on it, going beyond the so-called usual “aesthetic”, which is more like antiseptic in this day and age. VI’s speed and iciness is much different, there’s something noticeably other about it at first, and it’s primarily their resistance to playing the same old chord progressions, the same expected drum assavlts 100%, the same old yawn session. Instead, what they do is create a sense of newness that should confront the usual black metal tank dweller. But, interestingly, it’s not a grower, as they say, it’s immediate, but at the same time it will take a full go to get a handle of what they’ve done, and by then you’ll be ravenous to try it all over again. The epic orchestral work, which verges on more of the dark ambient, speed slowing to atmospheric chords, shifts in tempo that never seem to stop the flow, at times VI is truly amazing in their approach, but never so much as to become irritating, with a sense of “doing this for the sheer weirdness of it all.” They’re not one of those kinds of bands, they’re French black metal par excellence. See, we even used some French in this very review, that’s smart stuff. Knowing what Aosoth’s done over the years, expect big things from VI, and soon.
Written by Stanley Stepanic
VI: De Praestigiis Angelorum
Agonia Records
4.7 / 5
