Band:	Pensées Nocturnes
Album:	Nom D'une Pipe!
Style:	Neoclassical, Avantgarde black metal
Release date:	March 2013

01. Il A Mangé Le Soleil
02. Le Marionnettiste
03. Les Hommes A La Moustache
04. Le Berger
05. La Chimère
06. L'Androgyne
07. La Sirène
08. Le Choeur Des Valseurs
09. Bonne Bière Et Bonne Chère

So Pensées Nocturnes marks the third act in my Big Top Three Ring Cirque du Metal Francais, brought to you by LADLO. If I butchered that, it's for my amigo Collin.

(Pours some 1664 or whatever else the French pass for beer on the ground.)

When I reviewed Way To End, one of LADLO's other recent releases, I referred to it as "carefully controlled chaos". It threatened to spin out of control at times, but never quite did.

Yeah, all pretense of that is tossed out the window here.

Nom D'une Pipe! is like the journey of an absinthe-fueled Monsieur Bungle wandering between current French black metal, the vices of Paris in the roaring 20's, and a Cirque de Freaque. (Shit. It is right there on the cover laying it out for even the simplest of us.)

The album opens with some slight pomp and circumstance as a female necromancer attempts to conjure Xarkozi, The Sun Eater. A few shades of Oranssi Pazuzu chilling, floating through space ensue, then it doesn't just go off the rails on le TGV Fou, instead it's a flat out train wreck.

Some black metal bands like to shift between fast and slow. Maybe roars here, rasps there, and some ambient moments to really throw the listener for a loop.

Nothing so simplistic here.

A dissonant guitar runs over vaguely operatic vocal warbling and gets tossed against a squeeze box (for French feel), then countered with bestial howls and dissonant instruments then against horn sections.

One moment it's black metal. The next it is le cirque circa 1890. The following passage conjures the atmosphere of Parisian jazz clubs in the 20's? only to be followed up with something that sounds like Orb dubbing reggae or a child's music box lullaby.

The end result is a listening experience every bit as coherent as watching TV and mashing a random new channel every 90 seconds or so. Some blips will be intriguing, others at least interesting, and some as annoying as an informercial pimping mango flavored edible socks.

My biggest problems with this are the disjointed shifts or evolutions that prevent coherence, and yet even with the inclusion of a wide variety of non-traditional BM instruments (squeeze box?) it's still not done with such a reckless ferocity like, say, the "chaotic. fucking. mess." of Ebonylake.

Undoubtedly Pensées Nocturnes has some bizarre vision they are chasing, merging then and now, and it ain't easy being avante garde? but their vision and I are hallucinating drunks stumbling home in the night. Sometimes we cross paths and maybe enjoy each other's company for a block? and at other times wander in opposite directions, thankful to be free of each other's (annoying) company.