The internet is a magical place. Eight years ago, it was Devil Doll. Thanks to the back-then-still-young P2P programs, everyone on forums and websites knew Devil Doll, everyone had strong views on them, either unconditional love or hate, and everyone had heard their albums. Right, no one had paid even a penny for their albums, but how could you when editions were limited and distribution was almost non-existent?

When people outside "real life" metal music communities started listening to some more music that wasn't the classics, it was Maudlin of the Well, Ephel Duath, and some other similar avant-garde bands.

Shortly after that, it was Pig Destroyer, Dream Theater, Impaled, and so on, and so forth. Suddenly, the internet metal hype machine stopped hyping singular bands: it started hyping genres. Soon it was sludgecore (back then no one really called it post-anything) with Neurosis and Isis, after that it was drone with Sunn O))) and Jesu.

While some select few bands were hyped sometimes, the internet was no longer the anarchist hype machine anymore, it was more of a coordinated system. Surely we can analyze all that from the bandwidth-point of view but it'd probably fit Slashdot much more than Maelstrom. Anyway, the latest hyped genre in metal is, surely you've noticed, post-metal, including bands like Alcest and, more recently, Amesoeurs. Sure, saying it's "post-metal" is probably stretching it, but surely enough Amesoeurs aren't your usual metal band.

Don't let the hype fool you, however. Amesoeurs is not black metal, and it's far enough from being metal for most "kvlt" metalheads to accept. It's a post-punk / coldwave album with subtle and not-so-subtle metal influences, mainly in the form of a few black metal tracks and distorted riffs all around. However, whoever dismisses it because it's "not metal" is missing out on a brilliant release. It's also an album sporting some spot-on noise segments and French pop bits, so of course analyzing it from a metal point of view won't make it sound good.

The Amesoeurs sound evolved a lot from their we-kind-of-want-to-be-Peste-Noire EP, mainly because Neige isn't trying to be Peste Noire with his riffs anymore. In fact, even his black metal parts aren't at all like Peste Noire. Then again, you shouldn't expect raw black metal from the guy who's Alcest's mastermind as well. Some people hated that, but there's obvious compositional development if one listens to their EP and their self titled album in sucession, as long as one somewhat enjoys Joy Division more than, say, Mutiilation.

Maybe it's hyped because Amesoeurs has one of the most distinctive atmospheres ever found in an album released by metal musicians, but it's just addictive without ever going for the "hey, I'm the Alcest dude!" kind of thing. At the same time, the trademark French pop-sounding Neige riffs are still there, reinforced by the French pop-sounding vocals and the French pop-sounding vocal lines. We'll go as far as to say that the female singer is kind of chanson-ish sometimes. That is, when she's not screaming her lungs out or singing through vocal effects. Even the drum patterns are French pop-sounding sometimes... when they are not using disco patterns or something crazy like that.

Sure, Amesoeurs is easy to listen to — it's "entry-level," as they say, but that doesn't mean it's any less of a strong album. Perhaps the fact that every song is carefully done without abusing shortcuts for the sake of making each song longer, the fact that the "intro" track is easily the best track on the record, or the fact that its production is about as kvlt as a bucket full of kitties and it fits (sacrilege!), but for whatever reason, Amesoeurs isn't your average album.

Amesoeurs manages to be both atmosphere-heavy and catchy without losing any kind of musical quality. That's without even mentioning the fact that, holy moly, tracks go somewhere without abusing blastbeats or acoustic interludes, and that's enough to make most black metal people mad. Discarding it just because they are mad at it getting publicity is just silly, especially when the album's a groundbreaking piece of music, metal or not.

Maybe this review is pointless, as every single one of you will have heard it by the time it's posted, right? In fact, the hype will have died down, everything about it will have been reviewed, but the name "Amesoeurs" will stay for some years, hopefully when people realize just how much black metal influences can do for an album and how much song craft is a lost art in black metal these days. That, and how closeminded a so called "extreme metal" genre can get when a band is helped by the huge unpaid marketing that characterizes the internet these days. "They've sold out!" "Bring back the old Amesoeurs!" Oh, please. (9.8/10)

review by: Mladen Škot

Oh, good, Amesoeurs have already split up. No need to support them by buying this, "a kaleidoscopic soundtrack for the modern era," as Amesoeurs called it. Let's just call it "a pretentious pseudo-intellectual exercise in nothing."

Their first and only album isn't all bad — the sound of it is really good. Markus Stock is the man. He was obviously told to make it sound as nocturnal and moody as possible, and he did an exquisite, gentle job.

But, count the sound out and you've pretty much counted everything else out. The female vocals lack vibrato and emotion, and somewhere between brushing her teeth and falling asleep, the singer actually sings a few things that can remotely be called "vocal lines."

The drummer should be shot. Very good at playing a blastbeat or two, but somehow took being "progressive" as "doing whatever" and the moment you hear him doing dance-y beats (like, the second song), not even the moody sound can make it sound believable. He's still playing dance beats, damn it, no matter how gentle they sound. Contrasts are almost always good, they are a big part in some of the best music out there, but being an idiot and pretending to be smart is hard to pull off, and, in this case, impossible.

Amesoeurs also had guitars. Unfortunately. Whoever said "black metal, post-punk, shoegaze" in one sentence probably ended up hospitalized for mental breakdown. It doesn't work. It might have worked if Neige (the man is apparently famous for playing in a lot of bands) actually bothered writing proper songs. But no, you get half-distorted guitar, bare traces of melodies, and mostly pointless clean passages and loads of down-strokes upon down-strokes of minor chords... chord sequences that can't be properly called themes, riffs or anything else. Take the "songs" separately and they aren't even proper songs, although they always hint at trying to be.

To Neige's credit, at least he knows how to play and has enough imagination to throw different shapes of nothing into his music, but in the end all you get is an hour of something trying to be innovative, taking a turn into embarrassing and ending as irritating. (4/10)