(We begin a new week at NCS with DGR’s review of the debut album from the Swiss band Apolaustic, which is out now on Transcending Obscurity Records.)
Often when a band splits with a long-tenured vocalist it can feel like the group have hard-capped themselves at about eighty percent of their potential. While the reasons why long-time vocalist Romain Negro stepped down from Swiss tech-death group Stortregn are likely out there, that sort of muckracking – while amusing – has never been something we’ve been too interested in here. Instead, we exist in a series of zeroes and ones: is person in band? is person not in band? and we roll from there.
Sometimes, lineup changes can even be refreshing; a new perspective can recharge a band. But when you have a creature created already so strong, it can feel a bit like you’ve hobbled yourself on both fronts. and the respective projects that form afterwards always land at “pretty good” but never the “spectacular” heights of old. Thankfully, Stortregn’s One Eternal release went far in assuring us that would not be the case and now we also have Apolaustic, a new solo effort from Romain Negro handling all of the songwriting and vocals while recruiting Nicolas Muller on drums and Merlin Bogado for bass and guitar work for an album that is not all too dissimilar from the high-speed extremity of Stortregn, except for the much, much larger taste for melodic black metal. The result is in an eight-song, forty-minute release entitled No Plenitude Without Suffering, and thankfully Apolaustic have also dodged the eighty-percent potential cap with an absolutely killer album.
If there is one guarantee between the two projects it is that the appeal of velocity still shines quite brightly. Romain on his own has created eight songs that sound like an oncoming hurricane and move with the speed of a supercar. Any questions about that sort of thing would be laid to rest by the blast-happy opening of “Devouring The Past” as it rips through some classic black-metal riffwork and vocal lines. Romain’s screaming voice has always seemed more befitting something in the style of a black-metal group and so it seems that Apolaustic is serving as the home for that sort of thing. It’s the sort of thing in music where you’re shocked that it took so long to return to this point.
“Devouring The Past” alone moves with the speed of an outward explosion and only calms itself down at a halfway mark for a quiet transition, which appears so suddenly and in such a clipped nature that it is as if the first song had actually reached its end. It’s a testament to the fact that even among two different bands, Romain is still going to slam your standard four-minutes worth of music into two and a half and then bring the song around again for a second go. It’s no wonder that after just one song you stumble out of a listening session as if you’ve been in a bar fight. The Inferi crew would be proud someone else is joining in on their game. No Plenitude Without Suffering is an album wherein the actual breathing moments could be counted on one hand; everything else is part of an ever-churning sea because it turns out Apolaustic have a lot to say within the forty minutes they ask of you.
By moving his solo work more in line with a blackened style, Romain has allowed room for haunting atmospherics to work their way into Apolaustic as well. That aforementioned small handful of breaks within the album are usually perforated by quiet keys or echoing guitar. No Plenitude Without Suffering exists in a state of constantly on fire for the most part, but in those segments there is a sense of a small breeze blowing through a burned-out wreck. It’s the sort of charred decay we often joke about being left behind by an album like this made into a moment within the song. No Plenitude Without Suffering is both the sound of a constant world-ending battle and also the moments immediately afterward.
Consider the immediate pairing that follows our much-discussed opening song: “Fragments From A Misty Journey” and “Testimony Of An Obsolescent World”, the two songs operating as one larger piece. “Fragments From A Misty Journey” is one of the “all acceleration all the time” style songs, tearing its way through five minutes with the efficiency of heavy machinery logging a forest, whereas “Testimony Of An Obsolescent World” shares a lot of the same DNA, yet tries to be a bit more progressive with its calm opener – break number one – before unleashing part after part after part on top of the listener.
“Testimony From An Obsolescent World” often slows down for a melodic break and guitar lead before spilling back into a whole other segment. Even though it clocks twelve seconds shorter than its immediate predecessor, the two combined are ten and a half minutes of standing in the middle of a sandstorm and letting it wear you down to nothing.
It would be criminal to dive into the back half of No Plenitude Without Suffering without the same sort of enthusiasm though, because the one interstitial song Apolaustic has created is only fifty-seven seconds long but serves as a pretty clear signal that the following three are going to be impressively indulgent. Which is why it’s no wonder its two younger siblings are seven and six and a half minutes respectively.
The acoustic break of “Smells Like Dead Autumn Fire” serves as break number two on No Plenitude Without Suffering before the album then lowers you into the seven-minute journey of “Black Flame Reviver” which moves through black metal riffs, doom riffs, progressive riffs, echoed vocals, and a saxophone solo – all within two and a half minutes. “Black Flame Reviver” is as ambitious as a song can get, calling to mind some of the battle-hardened viking metal parts to add to an already extensive pile of ideas. If the goal of “Black Flame Reviver” was to combine as much of No Plenitude Without Suffering as possible into one song, then that is goal achieved. Combined with its introductory friend and you have an eight-minute odyssey into the back third of the album as a whole – one that still includes a few surprises and one final scorcher in closer “Peregrination Towards Childhood Memories”.
No Plenitude Without Suffering is a stunning release, appreciated even more once you’re able to get past the first couple of overwhelming listens. Apolaustic have packed this album to the absolute top with melodic black and melodic death metal guitar and then powered it all by a drumkit that never seems to let up. This is an album with an encyclopedia’s worth of ideas in play, and so the entertainment of such an album can move in three phrases: those first overwhelming few, then enjoyment of the insanity taking place, then dissection of said insanity.
Even though Romain and his former band find themselves on two different pathways at the moment, it is also awesome to see that this is one of those rare cases where the two buds born off of the initial flower are both working out just as well. Apolaustic have a fantastically infernal album with No Plenitude Without Suffering, unleashing forty minutes of guitar fireworks and catchy melodies that are increasingly difficult to deny. The ghostly moments wherein the album takes its breaks serve as great refreshers before the next absolute wall of music comes bearing down upon you. No Plenitude Without Suffering takes the idea of dynamics and does its damned hardest to contort it to its own personal philosophy of high-speed madness and hammers it almost all the way home by the time its last song closes out on quiet piano notes.
https://apolaustic-label.bandcamp.com/album/no-plenitude-without-suffering
https://facebook.com/ApolausticBand