Metal is an endless genre – who would have guessed? – which seems to birth something parallel to something else nearly every calendar year. One thing much of this endless spawn of (insert your dark lord of choice) shares with one another is tempo, or, more precisely, a lack of one. Sure, there are riffs, but they march to their own beat, which, more often than not, means no proper beat at all. Enter the French outfit Epitaphe, progenitors of Eventide and their debut release, Waterline. The album apparently emerged out of the recording session for Epitaphe’s II, and Waterline can be thought of as a kind of amorphous, wayward offshoot of II. What transpires over four tracks – two long, one medium, and one very short – is meandering indeed, more of a muddied air than anything cogent or fully formed. 

There are chanting voices on the opener, “Eventide” (at this point, something of a standard in the genre), and even some fluttery drums later on the following track, “Waterline”, though much of this drowns in the murky waters of some oddly placed horns – a strange choice, to be sure. Whether one is partial to the alto registers of the saxophone or not is of little consequence, for the effect is one of exploring the upper registers of the frequency spectrum (not exactly the purview of dark metal). The overall image is one that feels improvised, but the atmospheric tendencies are frequently obscured by the aforementioned sax. “Adrift”, the shortest of the four pieces, is a piano interlude that belongs more to the world of Denis Villeneuve than to anything remotely demonic. The final installment, “Sphere”, is a noisier affair, promising perhaps something befitting the metal genre in future work from Eventide.

For fans of dark ambient, improvised drone work, and everything in between, as well as the work of Epitaphe, who, with Waterline, have now managed to construct a genealogy all their own.