PLEBEIAN GRANDSTAND - False Highs, True Lows

Plebeian Grandstand - False Highs, True Lows (2016, Throatruiner Records)

Dissonant Black Metal from Toulouse, France that sounds really evil and poisonous might be the right definition when someone wants to put a label on Plebeian Grandstand’s latest album False Highs, True Lows. Leaving behind their Hardcore edge to a more asymetric Black Metal as well as being often compared to their compatriots of Deathspell Omega. This critic would prefer to call them the heirs of the contemporary Mayhem (circa Ordo Ad Chao, Esoteric Warfare).

False Highs, True Lows is packed with eight songs of homogenous and very hermetic aesthetic of Black Metal. Those songs like ‘’Oculi Lac’’ and ‘’Eros Culture’’ have a unique flair for contemporary Black Metal. Much like False’s Untitled album last year, this is a demonstration of how Black Metal of today can sound out of trends and timeless without being attached to the so popular, in the underground, second wave of Black Metal.  

Sure moments of distorsion in ‘’Mineral Tears’’ and ‘’Tame The Shapes’’ are a bit in the recent tendency of ‘’drone everything’’ but they make an intermission in the cacophonous ecstasy of the slow evolving ‘’Volition’’ and the big payoff of ‘’Eros Culture’’.

False Highs, True Lows has the right dosage between screeching Black Metal, and ravenous slow nails to the board of its pauses. A superb album with a cover art that will divise but that will leave no one cold. It is another well known fact that the most recent releases from Mayhem have not been as popular amongst the early fans of the band and that their reception has been divided. It probably will be the same for the reception of Plebeian Grandstand’s False Highs, True Lows, it is divise yet audacious and bold. Finally, for me it is effective and intelligent in its execution.

8.9