Frères de sang

Here we have a quite new band from France which is called Neptrecus and it was born in 2011. They have released a demo, a full length album in 2013 and in October of 2015 they release their second one. So, “Frères de Sang”, contains an introduction and eight tracks of overall duration of about fifty minutes. The first thing that can someone say about this album is “What an incredible attack is this!”. This album, after a completely useless introduction which is trying to get the listener into its theme, is starting with one of the most aggressive and interesting riffs that I have listened to the last few years. So from the beginning they manage to catch the attention of the listener.

Into this album, the band presents an aggressive Black Metal sound which really achieves to connect flawlessly the violent Scandinavian sound that we can come across into bands like Marduk and the characteristics of the French sound that we can distinguish into the scene since its creation, namely the intense emotions and a tendency to the school of romanticism. As you can understand, the album started with much power and with very interesting riffs and in that way it continues, surely it also has some less interesting parts but in general it is on a the same high level. The riffs are aggressive, other times full of hatred and other times melancholic. The speed mainly is fast with a lot of medium tempo parts, while into all of their forms, they are interesting and they can offer feelings to the listener. The duration of the tracks is good (from five minutes to eight minutes) and their structure is very good, so the listener can follow very easily the entire evolution of the album.

In order a good composition to be highlighted, the performance of the instruments must be also that good. Indeed, here the instruments are played with much passion and feelings as also with accuracy and technic. The guitars are harsh but quite clean and they deliver the feelings and the images flawlessly. The bass is almost inaudible but this is not annoying as the sound is full. The drums have interesting lines and they are playing a quite important role into the compositions. They are played with power, passion but also with accuracy. The vocals sound distorted, something that I generally dislike. Here they are not that much distorted, so they are not becoming that annoying and they are quite expressing and passionate. The production is dirty and harsh and along with the balanced mixture, they produce a dirty and violent sound. Finally, the lyrics are written in French and they narrate historic events of war, taken from the past of France.

Summing up, “Frères de Sang” is a very good effort which has a lot of feelings, images and experiences to offer to the listener. The Black Metal style that they play, combines the best elements of the two scenes in a very creative way and with a lot of fantasy so that they give a very powerful and very interesting result. I don’t think that there is anyone who is listening to Black Metal and not like this album. Buy it.