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Glorior Belli: Gators rumble, chaos unfurls
17/01/14 || Ironpants
“Wishin’ I were a freight train, oh, just a-chooglin’ on down to New Orleans.”
A cross-breed between black metal and southern metal? Let that seed set itself for a while and start to grow on you before you continue. These French dudes, with mainly singer Julien at the front with his in character stage name “Billy Bayou” may fool you at first into believing that their chosen path is for giggles? Well, I wouldn’t be too fast into rejecting these guys.
It soon becomes very clear that these fellows are on a more artistic level than you might think. The first song sets off with a real southern style song with the structure and sound of Down’s (the band, not the syndrome) characteristic, groovy riffing. Actually, my pre-thoughts about this band went straight out the door, they sound nothing as I expected them to do. For better and for worse…
There is a first time for everything, and even if Glorior Belli has been around for a while, it is my first encounter with these dark men from the swamps of… France. But, as you might suspect, it becomes a quite bumpy ride through the album. It isn’t the most two natural genres to blend with each other.
The already mentioned first song, ‘Blackpowder roars’ , is straight up southern style, and ‘I asked for wine, he gave me blood’ is more classic black metal, and all the other songs is a mixture between the two, more or less. And it gets a bit weird when you are pushed between the two styles and my brain has some problems categorizing what the hell is going on. But you can’t take away the fact that it is original and these guys use this to stay interesting enough for me to continue listening.
Regarding the production, it has some of the black metal atmosphere even in the grooviest parts, and “Billy” has a voice that sounds that if he has been force fed barbed wire every fortnight, never allowing the vocal chords to heal up properly. It´s a very raspy, in your face voice. Sadly, the vocals appear to be a bit high in the mix, and are floating above the music and sounds a bit placed out of context. I wish they have worked a bit more with that part of the mix, which would raise the total experience a notch. Besides the vocals, the rest of the band is properly mixed and the sound is earthy and organic. In some of the songs where they use mainly the southern influence, you actually can’t hear any black metal references and that gives you a dirtier version of southern groove.
I also praise the choice of song titles, as I am a fan of wordplay and profound wits. “A hoax, a croc” is off course a spin-off on crook, and “Le blackout blues” is a perfect song title, mixing French and English. More examples, ‘Backwood Bayou’ is also excellent, I mean, if the song was a southern rock tune it would be alright, but it isn’t. It is an instrumental that sends a sense of bad things to come. These kinds of fresh features are right up my alley, and I don’t think they are trying to be funny; they are just being witty and thinking out of the box.
This is a double edged album, it is positive that they blend so diverse genres which opens up for an interesting listen, but on the downside I think that it could also scare quite a lot of people away? The most kvlt listener wouldn’t embrace the groovy southern parts, not even when threatened to receive a colon rinse with holy water, and the southern metal fans are too far away to succumb to the darkness and would rather wrestle naked with crocs (the animal, not the shoe), all greased up with minced meat and lard, before even touching black metal. Nope, this is an album for reviewers and/or schizos, so in the end, I liked it a bit…and so did I… and me also. There is no patent pending for the horned one in snowy Scandinavia, and of course he dwells in the murky swamps of Louisiana also. I met the Devil on the Bayou, and I survived.
- Information
- Released: 2013
- Label: Agonia Records
- Website: http://www.gloriorbelli.com
- Band
- J: guitars, vocals
- S: guitars
- Q: bass
- JHM: drums
- Tracklist
- 01. Blackpowder roars
- 02. Wolves at my door
- 03. Ain’t no pit deep enough
- 04. A hoax, a croc!
- 05. From one rebel to another
- 06. I asked for wine, he gave me blood
- 07. The south will always know my name
- 08. Le blackout blues
- 09. Backwoods Bayou
- 10. Built for discomfort
- 11. Gators rumble, chaos unfurls
