Voices — London

Voices are made up of former members of noted UK black metal outfit Akercocke whose be-suited image and no less sharply presented vision of satanic metal gained plaudits with a series of albums released during the early to mid 2000s.  To some extent Voices continue that band's take on "blackened death metal" while amplifying the progressive elements and toning down the traditional black metal themes and imagery.

London, as the press release states, is an album with a concept, or at least a setting. A curious anti-romantic narrative involving murder, desire, and mysterious dark arts, all set in the London borough of Lambeth. The departure from Akercocke's sound are immediately apparent on album opener Suicide Note which builds a melancholic atmosphere around a clean guitar sound, piano and voice, before leaping into the more traditional blast-beat and shriek led Music for the Recently Bereaved. However, just when you think you know what they're up to the blast drops out revealing more ivory led atmospherics which ends with the tolling of the bells of Big Ben and a voiceover evoking images of Victorian London thick with smog, dark figures scuttling across Westminster bridge half shrouded in the haze.

The Actress and Vicarious Lover follow a similar pattern of light and shade with brutal passages being interspersed with more acoustic instrumentation, field recordings and voiceover. Precisely which era the band are trying to evoke is less than clear. The overall atmosphere is more Dorian Grey gothic than modern diverse Lambeth, but then again there is a sample of a woman with a Caribbean accent arguing on the street and references in the voiceover to cafe's filled with foreign voices. It's doubtful whether the band really intended to produce an entirely consistent and realistic portrait of modern Lambeth or whether such a thing was even likely using the black/death metal form. What they have done is to give the album a unity of reference that draws you in to the strange world of the "artist" and the woman called Megan who stalks him. Kudos go for the brilliant drum solo at the end of the track named after the above femme fatal.

The Antidote is another highly composed stand out track opting for drama and depth rather than simply pushing the thrash buttons. Like the album overall a multitude of vocal styles are deployed, adapting Akercocke's 'coven of demons' style vocal arrangements minus the full on black-metal shrieks. It's not all about showy compositions and voiceovers though; the album can still deliver a straight up extreme metal punch without frills when it wants to, and both The House of Black Light and Last Train Victoria Line are quality chugging metal songs any band would be please with, and fortunately The FuckTrance is a much better song than its title would suggest! The latter starts out with the band squarely within the territory of their former incarnation before a cracking build-up of dissonant piano and guitar breaks out into an almost danceable passage of melodic yet crunching metal.

The story ends on Cold Harbour Lane, a road that links Camberwell Green with the High street in Brixton. What the significance of this road is for the band isn't clear. Given the dark foreboding and spectre of violence and squalor that pervades the album perhaps it's the corner of Loughborough Junction with its notorious record for murder the band are thinking of? In any case the story of the artist, the poisoning, and the mysterious Megan is left open for interpretation. Extreme metal doesn't easily lend itself to complex concept records so it's commendable that Voices have produced such an interesting and coherent piece of work. It's hardly ground breaking musically even within the genres of extreme music. That being said London is different and combines many familiar elements in interesting and innovative ways, maintaining a level of intelligence and musicianship that few other extreme bands even attempt.