Zeal & Ardor - GREIF

Angry Metal Guy 50

There are bands you want to love and you know—I mean, you just know—have a great album in them, which they … continually fail to deliver. If you could just grab hold of their ankles and shake them upside down, you might even shake it out of them. Witchcraft is one such band. Zeal & Ardor was another. The black-metal-meets-delta-blues-meets-slave-gospel project, led by Swiss-American mastermind Manuel Gagneux, understandably caught a lot of people’s attention with 2016 debut, Devil is Fine. It offered something pretty well unique but it also suffered from bloat, unnecessary interludes and half-finished ideas. Its follow-up, Stranger Fruit, was actually my application to write in this hellhole and I suggested there was an absolutely gold-plated EP in there but, as an album, it failed to hang together. Everything changed with the band’s self-titled album: not perfect but a “scorching triumph,” said Doom_et_Al, the “sound of an artist escaping their niche without compromising their vision.” Is GREIF as uncompromising?

Speaking about writing and recording GREIF, Gagneux said he switched things up. Rather than flying creatively solo, as he has previously, he brought his band fully into the fold because the five guys “basically gave this project seven years of their lives on tour, so it felt odd to be the only one on the albums.” The change this has wrought on Zeal & Ardor’s sound is clear to hear. Many of the black metal influences that made the likes of “Row Row” and “Ship on Fire” (Stranger Fruit) or “Götterdämmerung” (self-titled) are gone, replaced by a greater reliance on electronica (“Go Home My Friend” and “369”), as well as something that sounds suspiciously like radio-friendly post-rock (“Kilonova” and “Solace”). Gagneux’s talent for writing raging, heart-wrenching lyrics remains, as do his beautiful, emotive clean vocals, and venomous, half-spoken snarls.

GREIF by Zeal and Ardor

But they are deployed together with some very different material on GREIF. If this was your first exposure to Zeal & Ardor, you would be forgiven for being somewhat bemused. Both “Sugarcoat” and “Disease” feel like rejected B-sides from Queens of the Stone Age’s Songs for the Deaf sessions, while “une ville vide” sounds inexplicably like a reimagining of the Stranger Things theme.¹ The bright and bouncy first half of “Kilonova” could easily have been penned by the likes of post-indie act Foals, albeit with a darker, gritty note of threat dancing around the edges, while “Thrill” borders on being an Arctic Monkeys track. “Clawing Out” takes the industrial, Nine Inch Nails sound (plus a little late-era Slipknot), which Zeal & Ardor has dabbled in previously, to the next level, and not in a way I enjoyed. On the flip side, the album is bookended with some great cuts. Pretty opener “the Bird, the Lion and the Wildkin” sets a grand stage for “Fend You Off,” which is brimming with frustration, anger, and hurt. So much for the start, closing duo of “Hide in Shade” and “to my ilk” are stunning. The former wouldn’t be out of place on any of their previous albums, seething with a barely controlled rage that boils over into black rasps and blasts in places, it’s energized and vital, while “to my ilk” is a gorgeous, percussion-free lament that tugs at the heartstrings.

To say that GREIF feels disjointed would be a significant understatement. Like the first two Zeal & Ardor full-lengths, there’s some quality material on here (“are you the only one now,” which reintroduces some of the blackened fury, being another one) but it’s hedged about with perplexing writing choices. Having seen Zeal & Ardor live (they were a highlight of 2022’s ArcTanGent festival), I have nothing but praise for Gagneux’s decision to bring his touring band into the writing and recording process. But, perhaps inevitably, GREIF sounds like the record of a band trying to find its voice and experimenting with various possibilities that simply don’t coalesce. Zeal & Ardor has always been experimental but where the self-titled album felt like Gagneux had found a balance between pushing the envelope and writing a (more or less) cohesive record, GREIF takes us back to square one.

I found this review almost as frustrating to write as GREIF is to listen to. It’s categorically Zeal & Ardor but, for a lot of the record, that’s only because of Gagneux’ hugely emotive and distinctive voice (now ably enhanced by the vocal talents of Marc Obrist and Denis Wagner). Change lead vocalist and I would struggle to identify a lot of this material as Zeal & Ardor. Maybe this is the price we need to pay for this enlarged iteration of the band to finetune its creative processes but it’s infuriating, following the riotous success of their last record, to not only find the band reverting to inconsistent type but also abandoning much of what defined it, in the gospel and black metal fusion. Sadly, that uncompromising drive to evolve has compromised GREIF.

Rating: 2.5/5.0
DR: N/A | Format Reviewed: Stream only²
Label: Self-released
Websites: zealandardor.bandcamp.com | zealandardor.com | facebook.com/zealandardor
Releases Worldwide: August 23rd, 2024

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