Zeal & Ardor : Greif
At no point during your record should I think to myself, “This sounds like Hozier.” Hozier, Irish singer best known for soundtracking horny moms’ fantasies as they pace through Target, is a definitionally fine artist; jokes aside, he’s a strong talent in the world of mainstream pop, folding in appreciable amounts of folk and blues into his work to give it a sense of grit and poeticism that, for a while there, had been lacking from the world of pop. However, unless I am somehow horribly mistaken, I pressed play on Greif, the newest record by Zeal & Ardor—a band that initially had been billed as a combination of black metal and slave songs, fusing a music that claims a kind of darkness with music rooted in a real and bleak historical darkness, some of the deepest dark humanity has yet carried out against itself.
The confounding bluesy pop-rock elements of this record are of course not its only musical matter. Lead vocalist and chief creative figure Manuel Gagneux’s vocals here often take on a kind of grunge-blues timbre that is remarkably close to Eddie Vedder’s, while the rhythm section at times recalls the throbbing syncopations of Tool or the machine-like syncopations of djent. The guitarwork skews from nu-metal style riffing to that particular post-Beatles modal interchange chordal work of Radiohead. This is all, of course, on top of the black metal and hardcore elements that still recur over the course of the record, now fully reduced to an occasional spice rather than the main body of the compositional approach.
So when I say that this is the most sonically varied record the project has yet produced, I want you to understand that as both a good and a bad thing. We here at Treble (and me in particular) are not opposed to ambition and sonic breadth; these evolutionary leaps, whether successful or not, are the sign of a living, breathing artist, someone reaching to their limits. When the gabber-adjacent electronic pulses come in on “Clawing Out,” for instance, replacing what previously might have been a fuzzed out industrial beat, it feels compelling and intriguing in exactly the right way. That the record goes into what feels like a Cage the Elephant b-side on “Disease,” the immediate next track, feels substantially less right. That the same song features very Queen-flavored harmonized guitar licks doesn’t save the track, even if it shows the great command of different musical ideas in Gagneux’s head.
I will admit I am not used to being challenged like this by a record. Typically what amounts to challenge in music are things like stillness, noise, abstract compositions or textural elements that are exceptionally wet, abrasive, granular, etc. For art-music listeners, those kinds of challenges get overcome relatively early, open up to the main body of our pursuits and interests. This record lands closer to the hard rock version of hyperpop, feeling at once like a combination of elements plucked from the annals of rock history that I sincerely have never heard placed next to each other that make perfect sense together and just as much ones that I wish had never been put to tape. It’s certainly a fascinating listen, but it spreads so wide that it is hard to imagine any given listener loving more than a couple tracks.
If I were a more cocksure critic at other publications that will remain unnamed, I might snidely follow up my joking opening paragraph by saying this reads as a rank and sour attempt at radio play and playlist placement, or that their ambition exceeds their grasp and the project has now become wholly unfocused where before its power was in its singular vision, or that we are presented with multiple compelling images of potential futures that are squandered trying to chase so many rabbits at once. I think taking any strong position like that requires a lack of humility on one hand and a refusal to accept the record as it is, where a piece like “une ville vide” which sounds like it could be placed on a Faten Kanaan record appears next to a QOTSA-style rock number like “Sugarcoat.” The issue as I see it is less the lack of focus and more that some of these experiments don’t work, grate rather than impress, and that the band still seems trapped in the iconography and presentation of their earlier iteration. The Armed recently crossed a similar divide, reconfiguring even the interior image of the group and renovating their presentation to match. Zeal & Ardor certainly never cease to be interesting; they just are perhaps better suited for the experimental rock circuit now rather than the heavy rock/metal one.
Label: Redacted
Year: 2024
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