ALCEST

Spiritual Instinct NUCLEAR BLAST

STRIVES TO BE A DEFINITIVE STATEMENT –

AND PULLS IT OFF.

Post-everything pioneers artfully stick to the script.

All credit is due for having effectively coined an entire subgenre, but Alcest haven’t always been an easy band to love. By the time founder and creative force Neige’s crew arrived at 2014’s Shelter album, the black metal elements that partly defined their original sound had been entirely excised, resulting in a credible but slightly dull attempt at a dreamy, quasi-ambient shoegaze record. Shorn of black metal’s underlying heaviness, Alcest suddenly sounded a bit wet and weedy.

Thankfully, guitars made an enthusiastic comeback on 2016’s Kodama, which felt like a shrewd upgrade for Alcest’s seminal blueprint, as opposed to more of the shark-jumping vagueness of its predecessor. Whether or not Neige reverted to a more familiar formula out of desire or desperation seems irrelevant at this point, because two years on, Spiritual Instinct is a clear-cut return to top form. A more ferocious and strident take on Kodama’s enhanced blackgaze blueprint, with a host of insidious, melancholy melodies and moments of unashamed accessibility, the sixth Alcest album strives to be a definitive statement and just about pulls it off.

Opener Les Jardins De Minuit instantly feels like a mature encapsulation of this band’s greatest moments to date. Those spidery shoegaze guitar lines are much in evidence, but there’s a beefiness and swagger to the song’s noisier moments that suggests that Neige is now more than comfortable being Mr Blackgaze and just wants to show everyone else who the boss really is. Similarly, Protection is as powerful a song as Neige has ever penned, with a soaring core melody and an irresistible sense of pendulous percussive swing.

For those who remember when the shoegaze movement was new, Sapphire ticks all the nostalgic boxes, with shades of Slowdive, Pale Saints and all those fey, arty cats who muddied the sonic waters with such brio back in the day. After all those years of evolution and experimentation, it’s moderately surprising to hear something so straightforward on an Alcest record, but it’s testament to Neige’s songwriting nous that it fits perfectly here and is beautifully counterbalanced by L’Île Des Morts: nine minutes of hazy riff worship and loping, postrock rumble with a truly glorious final crescendo. Next, Le Miroir revels in ghostly dynamics, with twinkling, spectral keys and a compelling slow build towards another dense storm of resonant (six-)strings. Concluding with the morose but elegant title track, which welds gleaming but slender hooks to another sublime exercise in ebb’n’flow, Spiritual Instinct may not be groundbreaking, but it does repackage the essence of Alcest’s appeal with confidence and verve.