Six years of silence reduced to nothing for Six Months of Sun.
Christophe Grasset (guitar, ex-Rorcal), Cyril Chal (bass/keyboards, Lilium Sova) and Daniel Stettler (drums) are back at work, offering us in 2024 their third album, Creatures, in partnership with Cold Smoke Records and Urgence Disk.
We kick off with Zaratan, a rather mysterious first composition that eventually reveals an impressive saturation within which the synthesizer expresses itself with intriguing, cybernetic tones. The track passes quickly enough, giving way to Shai-Hulud, where the thick Stoner influences are easily perceptible, as are the dissonant, jerky harmonics that populate the groovy rhythm, but the band also has some more aggressive moments in store for us. Gevaudan follows with more playful, almost playful tones that are at times reinforced by waves of thicker saturation, but the band quickly returns to heady sounds with Vatnagedda and its crazy leads that go off in all directions. The track seems to be coming to an end, but then it’s off again without warning for a final dose of heaviness before allowing Ningen – whose name is a tribute to the Japanese band Ningen Isu – to reveal its marked Prog influences. Some moments are faster, feeding the obvious technicality of the track, then Jersey Devil speeds up the tempo again, adopting slightly more melodic influences in the layers of harmonics that are skilfully superimposed. Dobhar Chu gives us a moment of gentle floating for an intriguing minute, then Wendigo slowly begins to charm us, gradually revealing its dissonance before enclosing us in its misty curtain. The second part of the track features almost ritualistic percussion, which finally gives way to intense rage, but the album is already drawing to a close with Dahu‘s strange keyboards haunting us, then fading into nothingness.
There have been times when I’ve listened to singular projects, and Six Months of Sun is now one of them. On Creatures, each track – or each creature – definitely has its own identity, but it seems almost natural to move from one to the other in the company of the trio.
85/100