Customer Reviews

Les Morts Vont Vite

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4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
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1 star:		(0)

 

 

...all over you. Up and down your ancient spine, given time. I found that the point was to let this hideous work reveal itself to me, track after track. Go ahead, judge it -- at first. It will let you: it knows you're only human. But beware! Though this soprano sounded, to my ears, a bit false, I later understood it was only because the forces had her in their hands as a puppet-creature, and were using her as a mockery of all human. When you really start feeling this, I believe you will have found the dark heart of Shub-Niggurath. And Lovecraft will be proud.

Shub-Niggurath is an entity in H.P. Lovecraft's Cthulu mythology. People would sometimes come into contact with the otherplanar entities such as Shub-Niggurath and would face the not-so-great consequences of insanity or death. stuff of which you would shudder to think, but their existence is so alien that makes the limits of human existence and cognition seem truly pathetic and hopeless. so much for the, erm, literary inspiration... The music is basically zeuhl, the primary reference is of course MAGMA, but where Magma's music takes one's spirit to soaring heights, Shub-Niggurath drags one through the lovecraftian abyss -- doom, fear, darkness, dissonance. for what it is worth, my translation of the french title is _The Dead Go Quick_ or something.

As always the main melodic tool is the vocals, here the harrowing soprano of Ann Stewart. Motivic cells are developed in an expressionistic landscape of ascending and descending chromatic chord progressions on electric guitar, piano and trombone. However, the zeuhl-stylings here are channeled through utter darkness and evil. The guitar solos are more like the tortured, primal sounds of early Bathory solos than anything from jazz or rock or fusion. The percussion owes more to modern classical than jazz as well. The painfully slow opening song, "Incipit Tragaedia", is a masterpiece of spiky textures, clench-fisted chords and modern harmony, with ghostly vocals. "Yog Sothoth" is abstract and horrible, feels like being eaten by the band's namesake. "La Ballade de Lenore" is minimalist, haunting and strangely pretty until it culminates with neurotic funk The last track, too long to type out by name, an unabashed miasma of brutality. music like this could be all too easily labelled pretentious, but the compositional skill is incredibly careful and evocative, and and can invite no complaints.

i hope you have this album already. otherwise, you must have boring musical taste or are simply too frightened to face this awesome nightmare.

But it's not that much like Magma, either, lacking the energy, repetition, and funk that suffuse Magma's work. Instead, this is music of brooding intensity punctuated by glorious frenzy. The best of Shub Niggurath's albums and also the most approachable. Not exactly easy listening, though.

This music sounds HUGE. Imagine the bass from King Crimson's 'Red' thrown even deeper into the red, with similer angular, sparse guitar and jazzier drums. Throw in eerie, operatic female vocals and the occasional piano, haunted house organ, and trombone. Produce it in such a manner as to emphasise vastness, as well as the subtlties of sonority and timbre. You will have Shub-Niggurath's 'Les Morts Vont Vite'

I found this band by way of 'Magma', which introduced me to the strange french prog scene under the loosely defined banner of "zeuhl" music. To the best of my knowledge, "zeuhl" is used to mean that a band sounds like 'Magma'.

Some of 'Magma"'s output is wonderful (and some is awful), so when I saw this band 'Shub-Niggurath' assigned the descriptor "zeuhl", I thought, this could be pretty good. AND IT IS GOOD!

And it sounds nothing like Magma. This is some seriously evil sounding stuff, far better than anything else I've heard under the 'zeuhl' moniker, with the exception of the very best of Magma. HIGHEST RECOMMENDATION.

Since I don't generally listen to or review this type of music, those who follow my reviews may wonder what possessed me to review a group with the outlandish name of Shub-Niggurath. One thing, friends. Shub-Niggurath is a name from the fevered imagination of one of my favorite horror writers, the late Howard P. Lovecraft. The name of the band and the name of the third song tells me this French group may have been fans as well.
Knowing what I do about Lovecraft's "dream cycle" of horror stories, with all of the nightmarish names, creatures, and places featured in them, it seems that the band Shub-Niggurath set about to create the type of music that Lovecraft's creatures might have themselves composed. While the band does not create the hoped for level of sonic terror, it succeeds in creating an otherwordly cacophony that cannot help but inspire dread in the less stouthearted listener.
My favorites here, if you can call them that, are the opening cut Incipit Tragaedia, with its jarringly off-key background vocals and fury of blaring horns, clanging and clashing percussion; the discordant Yog Sothoth, named for one of Lovecraft's fearsome Old Ones; the hellish din and eerie voices of La Ballade De Lenore; and the unutterably harsh J'ai Vu Naguere En Peinture Les Harpies Ravissant le Repas de Phynee.
Les Morts Vont Vite is not going to be in heavy rotation, but I am going to put it on next time I re-read one of HP Lovecraft's more outre' tales. It may just make give his stories a little sharper edge. If you have not read Lovecraft, try him out while listening to this!