Welcome back to Drumming Upstream! I am learning how to play every song I’ve ever Liked on Spotify on drums and writing about each of them as I go. Once I’m finished I will delete my Spotify account in a blaze of glory. After today’s entry I only have 464 songs left to learn. That’s a lot of songs!
Today’s entry is a genre-changing landmark from the French band Alcest called “Écailles De Lune (Part 1)”. That means “scales of the moon” or “moonscales” depending how you want to translate it. Scales like fish scales. The song is quite long, almost 10 minutes, and this letter is pretty hefty itself. If you want to read the whole thing, and I hope you do, I recommend you open it in a new tab or read it directly on my Substack page. I have a lot to say in this letter about black metal history and Alcest’s specific place in it. I hope I’ve done a good job making that history accessible even to the non-headbangers in the audience, but if you find yourself confused at any point don’t be afraid to ask for clarification either by email or in the letter’s comment section. I’m a friendly guy, I promise.
Now, onto the song.
Side A
"Écailles De Lune, Pt. 1"
By Alcest
Écailles De Lune
Released on March 29th, 2010
Liked on December 7th, 2015
“Now see the thing about Soulja Boy is…”
I’d heard of Alcest before. I read about them on the internet. I knew that they were French and that since 2007 they’d been a matter of heated debate on metal forums. On one side were rabid advocates who believed Alcest were breathing new life into black metal. Opposing them were traditionalists who refused to accept that Alcest were metal at all, let alone good. For three years I spectated these arguments from the sidelines. During those years I never once saw their debut full length Souvenirs d'un autre monde in a store or spoke to anyone about them out loud. And until the summer of 2010 when I walked past a man loudly talking about “Crank That” while crossing 8th avenue on 9th street in Park Slope, I had never seen anyone wear an Alcest shirt.
To me there was nothing incongruous about this combination of clothing and topic of conversation. Alcest were and are a band for people who don’t just like music but like having opinions about music. As an aspiring opinion haver myself in 2010 I had already bought Écailles De Lune, Alcest’s second record and first with Jean “Winterhalter” Deflandre on drums, from the Reckless Records blocks away from my dorm in downtown Chicago that spring. But my opinions about Alcest, including where I sat on the question of their genre, didn’t congeal until I came home to Brooklyn.
I was not the only young man in Brooklyn, NY forming thoughts and feelings about black metal in 2010. Each time I’d flown back to visit between semesters I found more evidence of a trend underway. Gutter punks and private school math rockers alike were starting to experiment with the genre in local bands. Websites like Pitchfork and Stereogum had their own metal columns and frequently covered black metal in particular. Until The Light Takes Us, a documentary about the Norwegian scene that put black metal on the map in the 1990s, lit a bonfire big enough to burn down the Brooklyn Tabernacle in the minds of New York’s musical intelligentsia when it premiered in December of 2009. There was no denying it, the borough of churches was catching a case of corpse paint fever. It isn’t hard to see why hipsters picked black metal out of heavy metal’s bouquet of subgenres. Black metal’s predilection for low budget production and its practitioners’ habit of home recording make it an obvious spiritual cousin to the purported ‘Do It Yourself’ ethos of punk and indie rock. The genre’s sordid origins and real life body count make it even more enticing to those looking to sharpen the edges of their conspicuous interests. That black metal also sports metal’s most over-the-top and easily replicable visual aesthetic is the frostbitten icing on the grimmest of cakes.
I don’t need to tell you that metal fans did not take kindly to this sudden interest. When Ravenna Hunt-Hendrix of Liturgy talked openly of writing a manifesto about "transcendental black metal" while wearing a flannel shirt during a video interview at Scion Rock Fest in 2010, metalheads rained down the kind of digital vitriol usually reserved for women who dare to talk about video games on YouTube.1 “Hipster black metal” became an all purpose epithet for any band perceived to be made up of interlopers. There was a palpable fear that hipsters were going to ruin the genre by watering it down, making it softer and more palatable to the average music fan. The frothing did not stop what was coming down the bend. It turned out the gatekeepers were doomed from the start. The call was already coming from inside the house.
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