Free As Dead — Tombeau Vital

Here’s a fancy, professional affair from 4iB Records/Decimation Sociale, with a pro-pressed CD, in a full colour digipak. The album contains four tracks from Free As Dead, the organ-heavy project of Romain Perrot - better known in his Vomir guise. He is aided and abetted here by Andy Bolus (of Evil Moisture), whose contributions are described as ‘Background Squelch Sounds’ on the inlay. The CD amounts to over 70 minutes, and unfortunately, it does feel that lengthy.

I really liked the first Free As Dead release, Rêveries Par Mort Noire, and was very much looking forward to hearing this. However, the air of crypt-born mystery, and atmosphere that was so entrancing on that album, is less convincing here. To be honest, this is a quite turgid listen. The album is predominantly melodic improvisations on an organ, with more textural elements overlaid - the work of Mr Bolus. These improvisations are more often than not imbued with a quiet, slightly twee, melancholy - the kind of thing you might find in the more innocent moments of old horror films. In small chunks, this might be quite palatable, but Tombeau Vital lashes many such pieces together, in lengthy, deranged collages - Adolescente En Crypte is over 30 minutes long, whilst both Ouverture and Complainte are over 15 minutes - and it does wear thin rather quickly. Added to this, is the fact that Bolus’ contributions are often quite inconsequential - somewhere between ‘noise’ and ‘noises’. It feels like they play out Perrot’s anti-art/trash ideas, often sounding like the elements of noise recordings that might get left on the cutting room floor, so to speak. Of course, these ideas run throughout Perrot’s projects, and thus sections of Tombeau Vital are played using the unconvincing piano setting of the keyboard in question, alongside similarly bad ‘string’ sounds. There are sections of muffled drum machine beats, as well as a sudden, incongruous interruption near the beginning of Béance, which almost sounds as if the rhythm has been started in error: a wrongly-pressed button. Perhaps most tellingly, there are also rather odd vocals scattered throughout the album, sounding like incredibly bad black metal vocals, or monster growls. These do raise the reference of black metal - and indeed, perhaps this genre, as well as dungeon synth, is the intended ‘target’ of Free As Dead - but more than that, they ‘derail’ the listening experience. They challenge the listener to take the album seriously, force the issue of the music’s worth…

This is a difficult album, and deliberately so, I’m sure. I used the word ‘deranged’ earlier, and that is perhaps the most obvious positive light to see Tombeau Vital in. Recast as some recently discovered, old reel-to-reel tape, containing the very odd soundtrack work of a 1970s horror film auteur, the album would be a notable, if tedious, curiosity. However, unfortunately, it just becomes tedious. There are, of course, moments of joy - the passages in Ouverture that sound like odd, lo-fi, bedroom electronica, for example - but overwhelmingly, Tombeau Vital feels like a very long slog.