A triumph.

Whilst I’ve essentially rendered the rest of this review pointless by busting my descriptive nut in the first two words, it doesn’t really seem that there was any other way to open a piece about La Mort Appelle Tous Les Vivants, the new album from French doom Titans Barabbas. Because, not to put too fine a point on it, that’s what it is. A triumph, Or, perhaps more appositely, Un triomphe.

Built around the frankly stupendous vocal presence of Saint Rodolphe, La Mort… features nine slabs of tectonic metal that stand as some of the best music to come out of France in a long, long time. ‘Slabs’ is a word often used in the description of doom, but again here it’s being used because there really isn’t another more suitable descriptor for the behemothic tone of Saint Thomas and Saint Stéphane‘s dual axe battery.

Despite the out-and-out heaviness of the overall sound, LMATLV is an incredibly varied album; La valse funèbre, for instance, is an incredible mix of early seventies prog, earthy eighties doom and, to top it off, what sounds like the sort of flourishes you’d find in Nouvelle Chanson, a sort of storytelling style of music peculiar to the French. It’s absolutely foreign – and thus doubly alluring – to the anglophone ear, but it’s only possible thanks to the incredible vocals of Rodolphe who stamps his massive authority all over the song with a bravura performance that’s easily up there among the best these ears have witnessed all year.

Part blast furnace, part King Diamond, part Talk Talk‘s Mark Hollis and part something else I’ve never come across – but all class – Rodolphe is one of the finds of the year. And whilst this is obviously no one-man band, it’s this man’s voice that catapults the songs on this album towards the stratosphere.

Saint Jean-Christophe‘s drums lay down the barrage over which the magic develops, aided by the bottomless bass rumblings of Saint Alexandre, and on the face of it Barabbas are keeping this simple and direct in terms of attack; yet it’s the little flourishes – isolated outbreaks of Hammond organ, and what sounds like the presence of a mellotron here and there, giving a distinctly progressive smell to proceedings at times, that elevate the raw heavy metal that lies at the heart of the sound to something very different indeed. This isn’t a unique album by any means, but the likes of Je suis mort depuis bien longtemps are incredibly close to achieving more than most doom bands could ever dream of in terms of expanding the genre’s horizons, not to mention those who participate by listening to it. And that makes this a very exciting album indeed.

La Mort Appelle Tous Les Vivants is out today.