Ashbreather - La Grande Bouffe - review
Ashbreather - La Grande Bouffe - review
Tracklist
01. Out Of The Field02. Into The Maw
03. La Grande Bouffe
04. Beef, Egg & Cabbage (Out Of Stock)
05. Feed Us!!!
06. Pulse
A review by
musclassia October 02, 2025
Starting life as an Opeth tribute band, Montreal’s Ashbreather have subsequently demonstrated a strong sense of individuality and creativity with their music. My introduction to them was the aforementioned one-song album Hivemind, an absolute ripper of a record that felt like a sludgier take on Cryptic Shift’s sound; since then, the jam EP Primordial Bong Soup felt like a big left turn, and I missed their 2024 collaborative album with Serpentine Cerberus (Mouth Of The World) altogether. La Grande Bouffe (translating to ‘The Big Feast’) is somewhat recognizable as coming from the same band as Hivemind, but it still sounds quite unique.
If I were to pigeonhole this album, I suppose ‘progressive death metal’ might work, as it is proggy, and arguably the most prevalent form of extreme metal here is death metal, but for a couple of reasons it doesn’t quite encapsulate the record. For one, as much as there is dissonant and harsher guitarwork here, quite a lot of the album feels somewhat restrained tonally, with higher pitches and almost psychedelic flavours. Second, the vocals (provided by all 3 members of the group) have a coarse edge to them, but it is rare that truly extreme vocals are exhibited; for the majority of the time, the different deliveries feel somewhere between singing, shouting and screaming without being easily described as any of them.
On the instrumental side, it’s quite a busy record, particularly on the four longer songs; the remaining two tracks include intro piece “Out Of The Field”, which gradually progresses from initial muffled heartbeat sounds to something of a fetid percussive march, and “Beef, Egg & Cabbage (Out Of Stock)”, the first half of which gives a window into the band’s early Opeth tribute days with acoustic guitarwork that could easily appear in one of that band’s prog epics. As for this own band’s prog epics, the shortest ‘full’ song is “Into The Maw”, which makes use of clean yet eerie guitar tones early on, as tom-heavy drums drag it towards more janky dissonance and aggression.
The skronky psychedelic prog-death riffing as this song gets going is intriguing, but one issue I will level at it concerns the mixing; I really struggle to hear the guitars properly in portions of this song, while the drums are also quite muffled, with the vocals arguably too prominent. Still, there are cool riffs in this song when they can be heard, particularly a somewhat sludgy riff striding forth just shy of the 5-minute mark, as well as a mathcore slant in the closing moments with panic chords. The mix does improve on later tracks, although the guitar tone used across the album is slightly peculiar in general, not always providing the exact vibe one would hope for.
In spite of that, the album does generally provide an audio experience that feels consistent with the oddball Soylent Green-esque dystopia. The title track comes right after “Into The Maw”, and is more oriented towards extreme metal, with full-pelt dissodeath ferocity slotted in between some tasty mid-tempo riffage. The final of these riffs, a rather stompy one, is backed up by sinister scraping mechanical sound effects, as if being stuck inside of a slaughter device. Fitting the album vibe in a different way is “Feed Us!!!”, on which the band’s off-kilter personality really comes through. There’s a slight wackiness to the song, from the initial swing feel to the almost playful groove possessed by its main riff. Even as the track turns more skronky, cacophonic and extreme as it progresses, there’s still a certain theatricality, which really comes to the fore when manic, hysterical vocals cry out above tippity-tap snare rim percussion in multiple segments.
The album’s longest song, 11-minute closer “Pulse”, offers further divergences. The first third of the track leans on the cleaner side, with mostly sung/spoken vocals and lighter guitar tones, while still carrying plenty of energy through the tom-laden drums and quirky vocal performances. Later it dabbles with thrash, off-kilter dissonance and almost jazzy cacophony, but it also has some killer riffs in its arsenal, while the final main sequence of it involves an almost Neurosis-worthy march towards the end, as massive tribalistic tom drums rain down atop a bed of meandering dissonance.
La Grande Bouffe is a more inconsistent affair than Hivemind, but those occasional concerns are more than offset by the impressive creativity on display, as well as a good haul of strong riffs and compositional ideas. Where Ashbreather go next after this is hard to guess, but it’s likely that it will be imaginative and compelling based on their record thus far.
Written on 02.10.2025 by
Written on 02.10.2025 by
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