Atrexial - Souverain

Sometimes it takes a little while to get a band. It took me four listenings to finally get what Atrexial are. And it’s so simple. “Souverain” is a simple piece of pure extreme metal. Imagine a sonic chaos. Now imagine an organized sonic chaos. That’s Atrexial’s “Souverain”. “Souverain” is a pure piece of sonorous assault as any extreme metal band has to be. But that sonorous assault comes by the singer, who in all tracks, regurgitates words to show all his pain and misery to this world. For most of the time, the drums’ pace is fast, but not the guitars. The guitars lines are the existing link to what is to be called normality. And let all the sonic atrocities to singer and drums.

What Atrexial’s “Souverain” tries to reveal to us are the two faces of evil. A brutal and merciless one which are clear on tracks like “Unmerciful Imperial Majesty” and “Catharsis Through Torment”; the other face is an evilish beauty that is show by the guitar lines in tracks like “The Hideous Veil Of Innocence”. Evil can be beautiful in Atrexial’s point of view. Tracks like “Illuminatur” also couples with this idea of conflict between the beauty and the ugly with a heavy guitar line. Some tracks like “The ominous silence” open with a challenging guitar line. The idea is to hold the fire by fingering some notes and letting some fly distortion free. To then firing a blast of distortion. The result is the sonic chaos we told before. Atrexial deal nicely with sonic chaos.

In my opinion, Atrexial were right labeled as blackened death metal band. “Souverain” is a nice piece of how these two references can work together. Some parts of “The Ominous Silence” are near progressive, as we can notice by its end. And then to open to the nicely played piano of “Ascencion” in all its blackness.

If your deal is dark and complex songs, Atrexial’s “Souverain” is the choice.

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