(written by Islander)
Five years after Le Cœur Bat (2021), and more than a decade after Un petit peu d’amour pour la haine, the genre-blurring French collective Non Serviam are returning with a third album named La Lune Dont Mon Âme Est Pleine, now set for release on June 12th.
The new full-length is described as “a symbolist concept album centered on the myth of Diana and Actaeon, exploring themes of the desire for the absolute, the violence it engenders, and the melancholy that follows.” And further:
Beyond the metamorphosed and tormented figure of Actaeon, the album also invokes Émile Henry, the late-19th-century French anarchist, as well as the apocalyptic goddess Kali, voiced by Mirai Kawashima (Sigh) in a powerful homage.
Those excerpts from the album’s press materials should create a sense of intrigue among listeners, even listeners who haven’t already been exposed to the shape-shifting musical nature of Non Serviam’s previous releases. They remain shape-shifters on the new album, and even more so, as you’ll discover from the new song and video we’re now premiering.
The song is “Déesse Morte” (dead goddess). As they are want to do, Non Serviam present it through a strange and ultimately unsettling video that seizes attention just as vividly as their music.
A meteor flares through the sky – which turns out to be the fiery descent of a voluptuous but childlike alien figure to earth. We witness her encounters with a stranded man and woman and a home invader, encounters which involve violence, silly and frothy domestic frolics, unintended tragedy, and possibly greater calamities to come.
If anything, the music is even more bewildering. It shimmers and glitters, swirls and bounces, joined by ferocious near-singing, a keyboard-driven dance-floor experience both mesmerizing and frightening — even more frightening when the drums go wild, searing tones become convulsive, and incinerating screams explode.
The vocals continue morphing, singing more clearly but also spraying acid, and the music also continues changing color, returning to more moody and mysterious sensations but also indulging destructive upheavals of hyper-speed drumming and typhoon-strength instrumental storms.
In its penultimate phase, the music reaches its softest and most ethereal phase around spoken words, but after a very brief pause Non Serviam discharge their most cataclysmic, abrasive, and mind-ruining episode of fury, a kind of anarchic cybergrind spasm of rage.
We will also share again Non Serviam’s video for another song from the album, “Abject Sacrifice“, along with our own previous comments about it.
In video a manic young woman manically does various manic things. She seems to be sweltering, to yearn for cooling water, but she leaks black blood, and in her mind she may be drowning; she may wish to die. Non Serviam members Void and Moon are occasionally with her in the video, or at least fleetingly present in her unsettled mind, providing a soundtrack to her madness. (The principal performer is Agathe Pailler, and she’s amazing.)
In the music, Non Serviam again display their adventurous disregard for genre boundaries. Around steady thumping beats the music moodily twangs, mysteriously shimmers, and abysmally moans, and Non Serviam’s members sing together, high and low, in hallucinatory and haunting tones.
The music also begins to abrasively squirm and spasm and to rake like a blizzard as the drumming furiously erupts and the vocals transform into cauterizing screams and frightening roars. Frantic voices speak and wail as a bass twangs and furiously scrapes. The music anxiously twists and contorts, warps and warbles, beneath Moon’s high-flying voice and glimmering frequencies.
After a moody pause the music erupts again, torquing the tension, the turbulence, and the agony to a breaking point, again anchored by big industrial grooves. And the changes, both musically and vocally, continue unfolding in the song’s unnerving final minute.
La Lune Dont Mon Âme Est Pleine will be released by Lay Bare Recordings (NL), on CD and cassette tape by the Non Serviam Circle (FR), and on digital streaming by Atypeek Music. Find more info via the links below.
PRE-ORDER:
Lay Bare: https://laybarerecordings.com/release/la-lune-dont-mon-ame-est-pleine-lbr074
Non Serviam: https://non-serviam.bandcamp.com/album/la-lune-dont-mon-me-est-pleine-album-2
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