LVC

Fallakr is a new band from France which consists of five members and was formed in 2013. Two years after their formation, they achieve to release their first full length album, which is called “LVC” and it contains eight compositions of overall duration of forty three minutes. So in its first effort, the band presents to us violent, French Black Metal, with the characteristic melancholic atmospheres and the monotonous style, but with a lot of references to the Scandinavian sound.

The riffs are aggressive and fast, but they always put out a sad, depressing feeling which is also responsible for the dark atmosphere that is spreading all over the album. The riffing doesn’t have much variety and they give the impression that they are all alike. So as interesting as the main technic that the band is using to create the riffs, the almost continuous repetition of that technic throughout the entire album, becomes tedious for the listener. The structure of the tracks is also playing a very important role to how interesting they are. Although their duration is not too long, their structure, which follows almost the same pattern in every track combined to the problem of the similarity between the riffs that I mentioned above, make the compositions somewhat boring and the listener gets tired by the album quite soon.

On the other hand, the performance of the instruments is very good. The guitars are dark, somehow bass but quite clean. They are played with passion and they are trying to present the riffs very vividly and with intense feeling. On the contrary, the bass is inaudible. The drums are played without mistakes, with a lot of power and accuracy. Their lines though are quite repetitive, while their sound is lower in the mixture so that they are not clearly audible but only the cymbals. The vocals are harsh Black Metal vocals somehow distorted, but quite expressing. The production is dirty and a little fuzzy, so the listener can’t distinguish the sound of the drums. The mixture is mediocre as on one hand it has highlighted the guitars and the vocals quite well, but it has buried the bass. Combined with the production, it puts out a dirty sound which makes the listen difficult after a few minutes. The lyrics are written in French and they are contained in the cd.

I think that after two years of their creation, we must expect a quite better effort. Fallakr although that they show that they have the passion needed and some good ideas which could have given some interesting moments, they fail. They make the listener get bored and also miss those interesting moments. With much work they may achieve to deliver a more interesting album in a future release. Only for the fans of the French scene and for sure listen before you buy it.