Artist: Rougarou
Title: Rougarou
Type: Album
Label: Digital / Realm And Ritual
I’ve been listening to this album for a while now and I am probably making a rod for my own back by even attempting to review it as…. its not easy music in the slightest. The notes say it is an amalgam of ‘raw black metal and Cajun folk art’, but if that is your simple expectation, black metal with a fiddle, then you’re in for a rude awakening I’m afraid.
Opening ‘Cursed’ seems straightforward; eerie melody, scything guitar, voices babbling in the background just beyond comprehension and then ‘Castle In The Swamp’. At first it seems like a primitive raw black metal sound but as the triangle percussion kicks in everything seems to shatter and without a doubt, even with the almost totally buried drums I feel I’m more in Gnaw Their Tongues territory. Guitars veer away, the triangle does its own frantic, insane thing. Someone howls, barking at a moon I can’t see, black metal surges in on guitar and vocals and triangle and spirals out of tune, collapsing into weird noise.
We get passages like ‘Running’, a squall of frantic guitar only. ‘Derelictus’ with breathed, deep tone vocals and the triangle sprinting away as a guitar drives deeper into some dark place I’m not sure I want to follow. ‘Mosquitos’ is a guitar buzzing along hight taut notes, ‘Cypress Roots’ goes deeper; pritive riff devolving with insane vocals and, yes the triangle like the metronome in your skull driving the artist utterly insane. Maybe that is the tale here? The howls are back, sounding lost and frightened even as they busrt asunder is inhuman gargles and squalls.
And ‘Dusk’ is sudden quiet…sanity? An acoustic guitar. Gentle.
‘Howling’ not so much. ‘Howling’ is a guitar spiralling down as the voice has lost anything resembling sanity or indeed sentience. Low, animalistic hiss and roar ending in high howls. ‘Clawing’ is scraping on a washboard that suddenly sounds like a sinister engine starting. ‘Perdu’ is snarls and
a clatter of percussion with the guitar buried way dwon in the bayou. No longer able to use the intricacy of strings maybe.
Until ‘The Bayou Moon’ casts a slow, silver light over the scene. A piano with that old, hollow, a little out of tune sound. Something found in an old back room. It makes everything that has come before somehow more horrible as the tuning worsens. I can almost sense floorboards, rotten and neglected creak as the pianist tries to create a grand, operatic presence and brings only heightened horror as the notes slow and deepen.
‘Le Chanson De Mardi Gras’ comes as a shock. A traditional Cajun song, here with a wild and erratic black metal twist to the vocals which makes it just more unsettling. A mad dance the participant is unable to halt, a dance of death indeed as the howls rise. Or have they found their people?
‘Bellows’ closes this descent into horror. Breathing, slow and scraping and deepening. Then the bellows of the accordion take the rhythm and rise in strength. The music is in the blood. The music is the blood. The folklore, the legends, the creatures are in the blood and come out through the music. With the music. Through the music.
This is absolutely not going to be an album for everyone. Not even close. It is difficult. Out there. It is not an album to pick songs from, it absolutely demands to be listened to from beginning to end. I can’t even pretend to know exactly what is going on but hopefully I have managed to offere how it made me feel. It is the noise of a mind collapsing into its animal state but somehow retaining part of its sense of self and its people. It is about the different that can be in us all. The strange. The other. Its disconnection from the norm and yet persevering and following its emotionally charged need for expression is bordering on the perimeters of outsider art for me. Except that outsider art can never know what it is, and in some regards this album is a deliberate and knowing descent into chaos.
Whatever, you should listen to this. Even if you hate it or think I’m writing nonsense (again) it deserves to be heard. Some of us will be very gald we persevered after that initial shock and confusion because what lurks down in this swamp is… king of beautiful and ugly and magnificent.
Gizmo
Walking The Liminal Space 