Recently, I pulled out Nord and Ausserwelt, the first and second albums by French post-metal behemoths Year of No Light, to accompany me on an hour-long commute into the city. Originally released in 2006 and 2010, respectively, the band’s movement between crushing and elegiac sludge/doom, delicate and sullen ambient soundscapes and blackened washes of noise excellently helped to quell my road rage when normally I would have been screaming at my steering wheel about shitheels who don’t understand that the purpose of the passing lane is passing and that a signal indicator isn’t just there to hang one’s hat or rest one’s beer on. I also got to thinking, “whatever happened to these guys?”
A day later, almost as if to rub my face in the fact I could have taken three seconds to check the band’s status at any point in the last decade, I received an email announcing that Year of No Light is alive and well and trumpeting the forthcoming release of not only the band’s latest and fifth album, Consolamentum, but also Mnemophobia, a 12 LP box-set collecting their entire discography – full-lengths, splits, EPs and collaborations alike.
Set for release via Pelagic Records tomorrow (July 2nd, for those of you still running on one-day-blurs-into-the-next-pandemic-time), Consolamentum continues the sextet’s exploration of sonic gradations and contrast – big stomps small, quiet compresses loud, and dawn meets dusk as tranquillity and chaos battle for speaker-shredding supremacy. As luck would have it, today we present a stream of Consolamentum for all your weepy mood swings, vein-popping lift sessions, funereal dispositions and brick-breaking karate chopping.
When we asked the band for a bit of insight to their latest, they responded by saying, “After spending a while watching the world fall apart, we’re back with a new album. Embedded in a bipolar and mournful ethos, Consolamentum embraces several realities and confronts them with their inner demons. As a sonic offering, we wanted to offer a journey where both light and darkness merge to burn down our memories on the altar of the void.”
Links for more info, ordering (for both releases) and to further spend your hard-earned cash are below. Note that the Stefan Thanneuir-created cover art of Consolamentum is presented with a die-cut that allows you to personalise the cover design by mixing the visuals of the four centre labels with the four inner sleeves, and in addition to 12 LPs, Mnemophobic also comes with goodies like a turntable slip-mat, pin, patch and poster. Neat-o!
