Melt: A dialogue through ambience
‘Like tears in the rain.’
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| © Melt - The Secret Teaching of Sorrow artwork |
Artist: Melt
Album: The Secret Teaching of Sorrow (2020)
Members: Guitar - Olivier Antoine
Guitar / Vocals -
Charlotte Shiroe
Drums - Romeo Viu
Berges
Bass - Julien Biret
Tracklist: 1. We Shall Not All Sleep
In Death
2. Moth
3. On The Brink
4. Hellion
5. Land
6. In The Field
7. On This Earth
8. Mind
9. Adarsh
10. One Last Midnight
11. Sangria
Stay a while and listen:
Every so often
we get a band that breaks our proverbial mould, so to speak. Sometimes through
inventive twists on well-established tropes, sometimes by reinventing what we
know to be the norm, and sometimes by creating something so unique that it
doesn’t really fit into any of the so-enforced genre classifications we’ve
become all too accepting of.
Today we’re
bringing you Melt, a band that is both the former and the latter, in a
rather contradictory self-expression. Melt
are known to play something likened to Dark Alternative rock with grunge
nuances, but I found them to be much more complex than the simple, one-worded
narrations we love to throw around. Why? Well, to explain that, we have to
understand a bit about the band.
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| © Melt - Olivier (far left), Charlotte (left), Julien (right), Romeo (far right) |
Melt is a French dark-alternative,
female-fronted four-piece that, on the surface, blend various gothic, shoegaze
and dark rock components into their soundscape, a sound that I find myself
hard-pressed to categorize, and that’s a good thing.
The band
laid down their roots in 2007 when Vocalist Charlotte and guitarist Oliver
met and started living together. Over the next 8 years, the duo laid down the
foundations for Melt by recording
demos that, in their own words, could only be described as “Chaos”. This
singular description allows us to peer into the development of what would be
the groundwork for their sound today. Chaos depicts entropy in essence, ie.
when a system leans into disorder and unpredictability. This very unpredictability
and chaos is a formula that has been built upon and refined until even the
turmoil is formulated into musical expression. Just as understanding the
inherent nature of what seems chaotic can give you a moment of clarity,
Charlotte and Oliver formed the band in pursuit of light and hope in the world.
Translating
all this into a form of musical expression is no easy feat, but was made easier
when the duo met the kindred spirits Roméo (drums) and Jux
(bass) who shared their vision and helped the duo become a fully-fledged band
for the next 5 years. Charlotte’s lyrical themes are pretty self-evident if you
look at the titles and listen to the music, but an interesting twist is that
she mixes an exclusive, invented language with English, coined as being “Oniric” to create lyrical content that
is truly disconnected from reality.
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| © Melt - Performing live |
The album:
Melt’s latest creation is The
Secret Teaching of Sorrow and it’s a widely textured and multi-layered
audio passage that, although may sound daunting at first, leads you through numerous
reflective emotional states as the tracks unfold themselves. The album wears
its heart on its sleeve with no shame, presenting you, the listener with a highly
emotive mosaic of melodies, and just like the said mosaic, each track is a
singular colour that fills the frame to create an abstract yet deliberate
design. Now to say it’s going to appeal every listener on the first spin is a
long shot, due to the eccentricity of the music style, but therein lies its greatest
strength. The peculiar personality of the album seizes your attention, even
just for a moment, and asks you to simply listen.
Now I’m not
going to go through the album track per track, because somethings are best
experienced in first person, but I do want to point out the outliers of the
album.
The first
being track four, Hellion. Notably
the duality of the track, in both style and meaning. Hellion, in guitarist Olivier Antoine’s own comments, “is a
song about what Melt has always been
focused on: the relationship between you and that unknown mystery that awaits
you when you die. In the song it is both called ‘Night’ and ‘Sun’, the song
talks about the irresistible attraction felt toward ‘Night’ and ’Sun’”.
The next
outlier is track seven, On This Earth.
Quite different to the jaunting pace of Hellion,
On This Earth takes a step back into
a more diversely saturated ambiance, with clean, melodic bars that open up to
heavier melancholic hooks, not before dragging you through the throes of a short,
yet doom-as-fuck outro.
The next
track, titled Mind, sees Charlotte delve into more aggressive
vocals and a timbre that caught me pleasantly off guard. Mind blends a few of
the bands more punk/grunge influences into the song structure, such as the inclusion
of the punk drum backbeat.
Those are
just a few worth mentioning though. The
Secret Teaching of Sorrow is filled with great tracks, although of the 11
track set-list, there are 4 intermissionary tracks that break the album up into
essentially 4 parts with moments of solemn reflectance in-between.
Overall The Secret Teaching of Sorrow is a great
release, both in concept and execution, with a diverse track selection and a
proverbial kaleidoscope of sonic hues to find yourself exploring. Whether it be
hugely emotive vocal ranges reminiscent of OathBreaker, the ear-worm hooks and
guitarwork reminding you of Dool, gothic atmospherics of Moonspell,
or the eclectic experimentation of Current 93, there’s something to appreciate
around every corner of the album. And trust me, there’s many corners.
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| © Melt - Performing live |
Other relevant links:
Melt
Plug Music
Agency
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