End of silence for Construct of Lethe.
After a six-year absence, the band led by Tony Petrocelly (guitar/bass/vocals, Near Death Condition), Patrick Bonvin (guitar, Near Death Condition), Kévin Paradis (drums, Benighted, ex-Agressor, ex-Svart Crown, live for Ne Obliviscaris) and finally Kishor Haulenbeek (vocals, Ash, Black Harvest) finally unveil their third album, A Kindness Dealt In Venom, in collaboration with Transcending Obscurity Records.
Artifice first envelops us in its softness before blast, rhythm and screams explode, immediately creating a strong contrast with the airy guitar atmosphere that remains throughout the track. The flow of violence is constantly evolving, changing rhythm with a strange naturalness before transitioning into the long, oppressive Bete Noir, where slowness and dissonance are used to enclose us in this dark curtain. Its nine minutes will give it the opportunity to calm down or, on the contrary, to set itself ablaze, retaining that touch of lightness in the background, but also points of oppression, as on the crushing final that will give rise to the equally massive Contempt and its throbbing strikes by answering the fury. A few more complex influences allow the guitars to create nebulous leads that add to the chaos already in place, but break up for a mysterious, almost silent final that acts as a moment of floating before Denial in Abstraction takes its place, unleashing all its aggression. The noisy break only serves to temporize the next waves of the imbroglio that befalls us by integrating a strange solo, then the short Flickering crushes us face down again before molesting us with its majestic orchestrations that turn into a military march on I am the Lionkiller to join its rhythmic with marked percussion. The composition quickly moves on to Labyrinthine Terror, where vocal parts become more numerous, sustaining the virulence of the patterns as millimetric as they are darkly disordered, taking us from rage to anguish before giving way to Monument to Failure. After its intriguing introduction, the track takes on a haunting yet suffocating quality, thanks in particular to the various voices that intervene before the eruption of Paroxysm as Pragmatism and its torrents of blast and tapping. Raw Nerve, Iron Will lets us breathe for a while, then reverts to its AvantGardist tones that perfectly combine rhythmic energy and volatile guitars, but the album draws to a close with the duo formed by the asphyxiating minute of Sacrosanct and the slightly longer, wilder Tension – There is Nothing for You Here, which puts brutality back at the heart of the band’s sound.
Construct of Lethe’s complexity and richness at work again on A Kindness Dealt In Venom. I don’t know if it’s madness, fury or simply talent, but the musicians have produced an incredible album here, albeit one that’s very difficult to access.
90/100