Band:	Fange
Album:	Punir
Style:	Hardcore, Industrial metal, Sludge metal
Release date:	March 01, 2019
A review by:	RaduP

01. Ceinturon
02. Chien De Sang
03. Les Boyaux De La Princesse
04. Opinel
05. Il Reconnaîtra Les Siens
06. Maintien De L'Ordre
07. Second Soleil

Ugh!

Fange are extremely abrasive, if you couldn't tell that by the cover art. They've been delivering some dirty sludge for the past few years, mostly through Throatruiner Records, a French label notorious for its noisy hardcore/sludge/black bands that are mostly the aural equivalent of getting your teeth kicked in. Now with a new rhythm section, Fange are back to kick your teeth in one more time.

Punir marks a slight shift away from the band's earlier sludgecore days, moving closer and closer to Swedish D-beat death metal while still maintaining a strong sludge and noise identity. There are a whole lot of vile buzzsaw guitar riffs all throughout this beast of an album that perfectly blend with the heavier and more monolithic moments to give this punishing experience that much more of a diverse sonic palette. When you're not getting a headache from the amplifier worship or the layers of noise, you're getting either gutturals or hardcore shouts in your face.

And speaking of noise, Fange have always found great ways to incorporate it into their music more than just "let's add it on top", and you can hear that most obviously in the industrial beast that is "Opinel", where the noise takes center stage, or in "Maintien De L'Ordre", which feels like hell's version of trip-hop. Most of the record, though, does have noise as a vital part of the song rather than an extra layer. So we got an album that not only blends power electronics and metal perfectly, but also primitive death, metallic hardcore, and angular sludge metal, which feels like it's already stacking a broken amount of power-ups to the kick you're feeling in your face.

A lot of albums are brutal and distorted. Punir feels almost transcendental in how many ways it can achieve that. It's not the heaviest, nor the most vile metal album on the planet, but for half an hour it almost had me fooled that it was. Carve out your guts.