Band:	Vestige
Album:	Janis
Style:	Shoegaze, Post-metal, Progressive metal
Release date:	September 2024
A review by:	RaduP

01. Différent
02. Deviens La Nuit
03. Démence De L'âme
04. Océan
05. Automne Part.1
06. Automne Part.2 [feat. Neige]
07. Appel De L'âme
08. Corrosion
09. Stigmates Du Temps
10. Envol De L'âme
11. Avant La Fin

Seeing that this album had a Neige feature, I expected something in line with blackgaze. Well there is some of that on Janis, but I didn't expect for the rest of the sound to be so far away from it.

Vestige is a new band, formed in 2023, and this is their debut album, so needless to say I don't have a lot to compare it to, nor did I have much of a frame of reference of how to contextualize it. I wasn't familiar with Naraka, the one band that most of the members were/are part of from before Vestige was formed (the drummer is part of a bunch of other projects, but drummers don't count). So my only hint of how to put it into context was the fact that Neige (of Alcest fame, but you probably already knew that) was featured on one of the songs, and it had a "shoegaze" tag attached to it. These two make a lot of sense together, and considering I had just reviewed another blackgaze album, I thought it would be fun to compare the two.

Well, Vestige are not a blackgaze band. A lot of shoegaze is part of the sound, sure, but the "black" part doesn't get to show its head as often as expected. There are plenty of moments where that's a clear influence in the songwriting, and plenty of moments where the shrieks sound similar to something from a Deafheaven song. But that's about where that ends. Does that mean that Janis is a metalgaze album without as much of the metal? Absolutely not. Yes, there are songs where the shoegaze/post-rock side takes more of the space, but the rest of the space is filled by something heavy too, just not the black/screamo that is usually part of the blackgaze combo.

What we have instead is something chuggier. Think some progressive post-metal that isn't afraid to take from djent akin to Bipolar Architecture, but to and have just a dash of Opeth-esque prog death. And yes, that also means that some of it is quite close to metalcore too, both in the chuggy riffing and in the vocals, and mixing that with the shoegaze can create some similarities with bands like Loathe or Thornhill or Kardashev. Shoegaze with djenty chugs a la Astronoid, shifting between sounding like a less black Alcest and a more gaze-y Vildhjarta, and somehow all of it is covered under the (almost an) hour runtime of Janis.

Vestige do a good job of not sounding like any one specific band, and also managing to make their debut take up this much runtime without it feeling like it is needlessly overextending itself. There's enough variation between the wall-of-sound approach and the chuggier approach, and there's enough done with it creatively than just alternating the two, to warrant such an extended runtime. The songs themselves are just really immersive regardless of what genres they drag you through, and there are very few moments where it feels like they're meandering or that the genre blend is gimmicky, and it does feel like some of its drawbacks do come from the fact that this was an ambitious debut with a sound that might get properly polished with further releases.

So, as far as Janis goes, I think the "modern metal blackgaze" proof of concept gets the green checkmark.