Band:	Miserere Luminis
Album:	Ordalie
Style:	Black metal
Release date:	June 2023

01. Noir Fauve
02. Le Sang Des Rêves
03. La Fêlure Des Anges
04. Les Couleurs De La Perte
05. De Venin Et D'os

I never quite imagined the phoenix as a horse, and I thought I'd see a new Sombres Forêts or a new Gris before a return to their seemingly one-off project Miserere Luminis, but regardless here we are!

One wouldn't be to blame for not remembering how strong of a hold the Quebec region of Canada had over black metal during around 2010. Sure, bands like Spectral Wound are still keeping Quebecois black metal relevant, but bands like Forteresse, Sorcier Des Glaces, Csejthe, Gris, and Sombres Forêts were what made the scene so exciting to keep an eye on, and I got into black metal around the peek of its relevancy. The latter two of those bands united under a collaborative project titled Miserere Luminis to release a self-titled record in 2009, a record that had a lot of expectations to live up to, but that always felt like a nice little short-lived side-project of two greater entities within the scene. After its release both Gris and Sombres Forêts would release new albums in 2013, and both À L'Âme Enflammée, L'Äme Constellée... and La Mort Du Soleil were larger than life masterpieces in their genres that only solidified the peak that both the bands and the scene itself found themselves in. And then... silence.

It's crazy to believe that it's been a decade since those two albums, because I do remember a time when they felt like very recent albums, but in the meantime both of these names became more mythical memories rather than active entities to expect new music from. But still, if I were to bet anything, I wouldn't have bet that the way any of these would return would be through their one-off reunion side-project, and yet it was the Miserere Luminis name that showed up when I scrolled through the upcoming releases. Which gave me the proper opportunity to revisit the original album, and listening to that right after listening to Ordalie creates a noticeable gap. I think my initial enjoyment of Miserere Luminis was more reliant on hype and I found that a lot of its melodies and post-rock injections fall a bit flat in retrospect, especially when compared to how much they cleared polished the craft on Ordalie. I don't think they've been working on just this the past decade, but this clearly wasn't rushed.

The best way I can put it is that it sounds like the components of the sound, from the depressive tones, the more aggressive melodies, the atmospheric focus, all of these elements of the debut, have had more time to sit alongside each other and feel more cohesive as a whole. The production being a tad more modern and pristine, together with the album's more cohesive flow, makes Ordalie much more immersive and engaging as a result. The emotional angle that was obviously gonna be a factor due to literally having "depressive" among the descriptors of one of the subgenres, but the overarching emotion feels more melancholic than depressing, and the strong chamber music focus in the latter part of the album, including a track solely dedicated to it, greatly enhances the album's emotional impact, though the long span dedicated to it did threaten to bring the momentum of the album to a halt. That expansive feeling is present through the soaring melodies in the (post-)black metal side, but that is one that contrasts so nicely with the bleakness of the shrieks.

There's plenty of emotional heft and soaring melodies to this comeback, and Ordalie feels like something that should reassert the two bands' presence in the current day as if no time had passed.