Band:	Ataraxie
Album:	Le Déclin
Style:	Death metal, Funeral doom metal
Release date:	October 25, 2024
A review by:	AndyMetalFreak

01. Le Déclin
02. Vomisseurs De Vide
03. Glory Of Ignominy
04. The Collapse

Le Déclin is aptly titled for Ataraxie's 5th offering, as they only wish to deteriorate your soul further into the depths of death doom.

Ataraxie are a French death doom band that formed back in 2000. The band's name derives from the Ancient Greek word "Ataraxia", a term used to describe freedom from worry and true happiness. And yet, their music seems anything but. Their style mainly consists of death and funeral doom mostly in the vein of Evoken, Esoteric, early My Dying Bride, Doom:VS, and Mournful Congregation. The band has 5 full-length releases to date, which includes this latest offering Le Déclin. Made up of 4 exceedingly long songs with a staggering runtime of over 1 hour and 20 minutes, Le Déclin is no easy listen. It's demanding and certainly requires time, patience, and total concentration, much like the band's previous outputs. Only when one's in the right mood and environment can this be achieved.

What of the music? Well, it's certainly not a style everyone will enjoy. It's atmospherically grim and soul-crushing, mostly structured in a mid-to-slow tempo, and mostly featuring heavy death doom slogging riffs and lyrics being partly in English and French. In theory, the intention is to put listeners into their most grim and darkest state of mind and keep you there throughout the entire duration, which, in this instance, is a hell of a long time. The album begins with its shortest song (which, at 17 minutes, isn't exactly short), the title track "Le Déclin". This starts off typically with a soft, melancholic, gradually intensifying build-up accompanied by haunting French spoken word up to the 5-minute mark, at which point things start to get seriously heavy from here on. At slow funeral doom tempo, the instrumentation is beyond powerful and the tone deeply crushing, which, along with the echoing gnarly gutturals and agonizing shouts (performed by vocalist/bassist Jonathan Théry), keeps the listener in an overwhelming state of sheer desperation.

There's nothing entirely original or varied structurally about Le Déclin (there rarely is when it comes to funeral doom), but emotionally and atmospherically, it does the job incredibly well. In terms of songwriting, "Vomisseurs de Vide" is 22 minutes of everything you'd come to expect from funeral and death doom. There's soft, melancholic sections that importantly provide a momentary breathing space before tremendously powerful outbursts of pure death doom are unleashed. The riffs are just pure classic death doom savagery, the bass is bone-shaking, and the tone cuts deep into your very soul. The densely suffocating sound and layering is helped by having 3 guitarists on board, Frédéric Patte-Brasseur, Hugo Gaspar, and Julien Payan. The drumming performed remarkably by Pierre Sénécal (which, for me, is a particular highlight) is mostly slow-to-mid-tempo powerful pounds, but the beats are so forcefully hit, they seem to resemble the actual sound of rolling thunder.

This relentless, heavy, death doom misery continues for a further 40-plus minutes, by which point most albums would have finished by now, so if you can endure another round that's great. With soft, mournful, acoustic passages from the onset, "Glory of Ignominy" is strikingly more melancholic-driven to begin with, but progressively gets heavier and the rhythm more rapid as it continues. In fact, the final stages are amongst the heaviest the band has ever performed.  Overall, "Glory of Ignominy" is a sensational song, and that's coming from someone who isn't even the biggest fan of funeral doom. What really gets me about it is Jonathan Théry's weeping and shouts as if he's going through excruciating pain, and he wants you to experience the unbearable suffering alongside him. "The Collapse" ends the album more or less how it began. However, amidst the regular mighty, slow, crushing death doom instrumentation, there's some striking upbeat OSDM sections with classic OSDM hammering grooves that give us a hint of Incantation. The two sections of death doom and OSDM alternate back and forth throughout the first half of the song. This is then broken up by a slow section that builds its way back up to a mighty crushing Grande Finale.

I'm not usually one for lengthy albums, even in funeral doom, especially when they exceed the hour mark (Bell Witch being a prime example), but Le Déclin is one of the few exceptions that seems to justify such a length. After enduring this mighty long slog of harrowing funeral doom, you won't know where your head will be at. Nursing yourself back to reality may prove tricky to begin with. Your soul will be an emotional wreck, and your senses will be diminished, and that is exactly what these French death doomers want. To reap the full benefits of what this album can truly offer, just make sure you're in a depressing enough mood to go through with it.