Band: MEDIIS TENEBRIS
Country: France
Title: Là où les Hommes se perdent
Label: Independent
Year: 2017
Style: Depressive Folk Black Metal

Review:
Debut full-length album from this French one-man-band, Là où les Hommes se perdent, impresses at first through its presentation: the CD comes in a homemade printed cardboard packed by hand, with the tracklist again written by hand with simple grey pencil. It looks very intimate, very personal, and this has a serious impact on the audience even before listening to the music, or at least that's what it did to me. By the band's logo one can assume it's some sort of Black Metal, and that it is, a melodic, depressive, introspective form of Black Metal with plenty of Folk touches as acoustic guitars, nature sounds, and especially whitles. The Folk-ish part is really soothing, it feels like the perfect soundtrack for laying down in the forest contemplating the past, but the other side of the record, the Black Metal one, is raw, abrasive, and teribly unfriendly to the ears although the harmonies and repetitive / melodic constructions of the tracks indicate the intention was different, but the composition is an excellent Depressive Black Metal that absolutely suffocates all hopes in you and induces you to a hopeless state of mind, so from this point of view it's damn spot on! The album is made of 4 tracks clocking 44 minutes, plus a bonus track that adds another almost 9 minutes to the whole, so it's a long material we get here. Recordings are home-made, using drum-machine, and if the sound on the Black Metal parts would have been better, this would have been a fantastic release, but as a debut opus I'd say it proves its point, it demonstrates serious potential, I only hope that on the next one Akhenar will choose a better production and maybe even real drums. The unique presentation of this material makes it all worth your money, I'm sure it was released in a few copies only.
Reviewed by Adrian
Rating: 7/10

Contact:
mediistenebris.bandcamp.com