Ataraxie - Le déclin (2024)^{Release ID: 55793}

Ataraxie are a french five-piece who play funeral doom metal with a large death doom component that is at once mournful, morose, agonised and crushingly heavy. Le déclin is their sixth full-length and coming five years after 2019's Résignés, they show themselves a band not to be hurried, neither in the frequency of their releases or in the execution of their artistic vision. As is usually the case, Le déclin has a massive eighty-plus minute runtime for it's four tracks, the shortest of which is a slight sixteen minutes in length, once more illustrating the band's commitment to allow their music to go wherever it will. These four tracks are the embodiment of despair, bereft of levity, the atmosphere is unrelentingly grim, with huge, towering and monolithic riffs provided by the band's three guitarists, punctuated with howls of pain and anguish. This is indeed the stuff of nightmares. While there are undoubtedly passages that are instrumentally lighter, such as the opening minutes whilst the title track builds, atmospherically this is very dark with even the musically lighter moments feeling introspectively maudling and bereft, with the protagonist sounding as if his grief has thrust him to the very edge of insanity.

I would posit from listening to Ataraxie, justifiably I think, that they are big fans of England's Esoteric. Le déclin illustrates exactly how adept they are, just like the Englishmen, at delivering punishing and crushing doom metal that not only lumbers along at leaden tempos, but can also explode into blasts of inutterably violent death metal fury at a moments notice. Vocalist and bassist Jonathan Théry also possesses a deep howling growl that sits very close to Greg Chandler's boulder-splitting vocal style, thus deepening the positive comparisons to the funeral doom legends further. Technically, these guys are top-drawer, with a precision and efficiency to their playing that makes it feel like not a moment of the eighty minutes is wasted and the production is excellent with a clarity and depth that allows free reign to the band's inate crushing heaviness without drowning out the subtle touches that help propel them to the upper echelons of the genre.

The songwriting is top-knotch. These aren't monilithic dirges, but fully-formed narrative journeys with each song undergoing progression with several transitions in atmosphere and tempo throughout their lengthy runtimes, leaving the listener (well this one, anyway) with the impression that they have just undergone a profound journey through a world of pain and suffering allowing either identification with, or some understanding of, it's fundamental effects. The simple fact is that funeral doom metal is not for everyone and even within the ranks of it's practitioners, despite it's (undeserved) reputation for simplicity, there are masters and apprentices. I'm not sure if Ataraxie could ever have been properly labelled as the latter, but Le déclin has most definitely confirmed them as the former. I don't make this claim lightly, but I would honestly have to claim this latest offering from the Frenchmen to be the finest funeral doom metal album since Esoteric's 2019 triple album, "A Pyrrhic Existence" and that is heady praise indeed.