Review by Sandre the Giant
I don’t know what it is about the French life experience that leads them to produce such unorthodox and revolutionary metal bands, but Viande are here to stake a claim to join the likes of Deathspell Omega, Gojira and Antaeus in this pantheon. Their debut full length, ‘L’abime dévore les âmes’, is due for release in April on Transcending Obscurity, and is death metal but not as we know it.
‘Les dents du gouffre’ opens the record and immediately cranks up the discomfort, an oppressive dark ambient/industrial feel swelling into a lumbering death/doom swagger and a brutal vocal effort. The suffocating miasma never lifts however, and the omnipresent brutality is coated in a dark and atmospheric tone. ‘Le ventre monde’ is a bulldozing death metal powerhouse, but again that blackness and uncomfortableness comes in again. It is like Viande are trying to reconcile the visceral and the insidious within their music, and struggling to contain each. The ebb and flow of the record is also well done, tracks metamorphosing into one long tale of dread and death.
The end of ‘la tombe avide’ is another example of something that Viande are doing unlike others; that discordant industrial sample, like Axis of Perdition or Blut Aus Nord, informing every devastating riff with a sense of despair or otherworldly chaos. ‘Le souffle des os’ brings to my mind a bit of Portal, a bit of Incantation but a whole lot of excellent death riffs and a healthy dose of that industrial ambience feel again. I should make mention of the drumming here too as it is an absolutely immovable anchor of the whole record, keeping us tethered to the reality of death metal while all around us tracks like ‘Lueurs de cendres’ want us to disappear into the cosmic abyss
Like Blut Aus Nord covering Suffocation, Viande’s work is at the same time technically and brutally heavy and yet the pervasive unease of the atmosphere around it is almost important to their success here. ‘L’abime dévore les âmes’ is an album that doesn’t welcome your existence at all, and wants to sit alone in the deepest darkness until the apocalypse it feels like comes to pass. Challenging, unnerving and best of all, devastatingly heavy, this is an album for the ages.
https://www.facebook.com/viande666
The Killchain 