The last few years have been eventful for Igorrr: first, a pandemic disrupted the tour planned to follow the release of the album Spirituality And Distortion... then, the band led by Gautier Serre underwent several line-up changes with the departure of its two vocalists, Laure Le Prunenec and Laurent Lunoir. Since then, the group has stabilized with the arrival of JB Le Bail (ex-Svart Crown) and Marthe Alexandre on vocals, after Aphrodite Patoulidou filled in temporarily. Igorrr started out as a one-man project, so we weren't particularly worried about the future, but we can guess that it took some time for everyone to find their feet and embrace Serre's unique universe and his crazy mix of extreme metal, baroque opera, trip-hop, breakcore, world music, and bal-musette... AMEN comes after these turbulent years during which Igorrr continued to grow and fill ever larger venues.
With such a name, it's no surprise that AMEN takes on an unusually solemn tone. If you were expecting funny accordion music and chicken cries, you might be in for a surprise: Igorrr glares and growls. With hypnotic pulsations, guttural incantations, a dark ritual atmosphere, and beats from the abyss, Daemoni cuts deep right from the start. With its possessed choirs, tortured riffs, Marthe Alexandre's melancholic yet panicked vocals, and finally JB Le Bail's raw screams that eventually burst forth, the beginning of AMEN sets a monumental and theatrical scene in a way that only Igorrr knows how, but radically darker. We often wonder how much of Igorrr is cerebral, with its daring and far-fetched encounters, and how much is spontaneous (we guess that improvised “happy accidents” also have their place in the songwriting process)... Here, we sense a more visceral approach on the part of Gautier Serre, something deeper that needs to be extracted, torn out. Very quickly, AMEN appears to us as an exorcism.
You have to hear the rage that Headbutt exudes, where, once again, irresistible heavy riffs crash against virtuoso piano playing... which is also struck with spontaneous rage. Metal, classical: Igorrr mixes and twists the two with equal love and, paradoxically, ends up being more violent with his piano than with storms of growls and double bass drumming! We revel in the sacred touches that the ritual takes on with the Limbo choir, recorded in a church, which brings the first lull in the album, and where the incredible Lili Refrain adds her madness and expressiveness to the ensemble of voices. Igorrr definitely has a sense of the grandiose, of spectacle... and of breaking tone.
As ever-changing as always, Gautier Serre's new mutant baby doesn't forget a few rare lighter moments that fall like a pause occupying the central third of the album: oriental melodies, bizarre electronics, harpsichord for dancing on tiptoes with a pinched air, pipe music... and food as track titles! Blastbeat Falafel, ADHD, and Mustard Mucous (featuring Scott Ian as a guest) reconnect with the absurd patchworks that made Igorrr famous, unpredictable collages of things and other things that we enjoy exploring. Of these tracks, ADHD, with its structure that takes us from incongruous electronic flatulence to an intense, poetic and apocalyptic assemblage of choirs, melody and racing rhythms, particularly catches our attention. Attention is indeed the key word here: by mentioning his ADHD, Serre strangely allows an explicitly personal aspect to filter through into his music. And what about those twelve seconds of 2020, that snarling interlude? Let's offer our two cents' worth of interpretation: indeed, the pandemic period mentioned above did not leave Igorrr with only good memories!
In its violence and energy, AMEN takes on a cathartic dimension, gradually weaving a more emotional and intimate connection than usual, despite the fun and entertaining aspect of this madness. Igorrr has already dazzled us in the past with his sense of the superb and the massive. If you have any doubts, let Infestis crush you with its heaviness and the sacred gravity it exudes. Although all these ingredients are present here once again and the ritual is both mystical and unpredictable, always with this playful aspect, it is also more touching, more authentic. We regret not hearing more from Marthe Alexandre, the latest addition to the band, who sometimes seems to be given too little prominence...
In its final section, AMEN still has a few surprises in store: the mysterious trip-hop with oriental evocations of Ancient Sun, to which Lili Refrain once again lends her incantatory lamentations, unfolds like a dreamlike mirage. Silence, in conclusion, finally gives Marthe Alexandre all the space she needs and revives one of Igorrr's finest traditions: haunting, melancholic and intense tracks whose poetry and emotions can be felt without understanding the lyrics. In its final moments, AMEN abandons metal, whose last incursion, Pure Disproportionate Black and White Nihilism, was particularly wild, to embrace a starkness barely adorned with a few machine explosions. AMEN dies as everything should die, accompanied by twilight violins.
As usual with Igorrr, the wide variety of influences and moods can be unsettling, and everyone will have their favourite tracks... Nevertheless, while it could have been just another ‘simple’ demonstration of Serre's falsely chaotic creative genius, AMEN marks an interesting turning point: although all the ingredients are there (well, we'll have to mourn the loss of the bal musette and chicken cries this time around), the face presented by Igorrr is not only multifaceted, strange and entertaining. It is also fractured, broken. Behind the layers, the creative frenzy, the theatre and the obscure mystical rituals, it ultimately seems strangely exposed, the masks of this baroque spectacle cracking to reveal an approach that is more cathartic than usual, more intimate despite its apparent megalomania, and therefore both more necessary and more touching. More than ever, understanding the radioactive Frankenstein monster that is Igorrr's music transcends common vocabulary to operate on a mystical level where emotions reign supreme.
