Bosse-de-Nage - Further Still

Since hearing about Bosse-de-Nage along my early explorations through blackgaze about 5-6 years ago, I never really found them to be all too thrilling. They’re not a terrible group by any means, but I do think they are a bit overrated among the various contributors to American black metal. I don’t think hey really bring anything significant to the table that no one else does, they stay relatively well within the boundaries of the genre, and Further Still doesn’t really diverge from their established sound much either. 

The opening track, “The Trench” works some New Bermuda-era Deafheaven blackgaze guitar work together with Bryan Manning’s more aggressive black metal vocal style. It’s one of the longer cuts on the album, but it’s probably one of the most painfully generic as well. It’s a hardly remarkable way to start the album, but luckily it does get better from there. The distorted bass intro of the following track, “Down Here”, leads into a more euphoric display of the blackgaze guitar stylings, still very much in the vein of Deafheaven, but sounding like something that band might actually not scrap immediately. And “Crux” ups the darkness from there immediately afterward in a beneficial way too. Manning’s more tortured vocal style fits over this type of song better than over the shimmering radiance of “Down Here”, but “Crux” builds to a cathartic guitar section that compliments the agony in Manning’s delivery exquisitely.

The fourth track, “Listless” ups the energy a little bit with some consistent blast beats and further snare abuse, but it doesn’t really do much more than that and it still makes for a kind of numb shoegazy experience. It does however lead nicely into a cool, ambient interlude drone of low, synthesized horns backed by a funeral-ish string section. It’s something like this that I wish was incorporated maybe more fully into a song a fleshed out as a potential tension builder. Nevertheless, it’s a cool addition to the middle of the album, leading into a more well-built piece, “My Shroud”, which bursts from a calm clean guitar section into a decent display of the band’s heavier side.

The next track, “Sword Swallower”, is mostly another mindless blackgaze performance, with maybe one cool guitar section near the end, but the song it leads into, “Vestiges” does much better to channel a more emotionally dynamic experience with its guitar leads and it makes much more effective use of its time than most of the preceding tracks. The album closer, “A Faraway Place”, makes a rather sprawling conclusive statement, but like the other underwhelming tracks on the album, it doesn’t really do so with enough in its toolbelt, and it finds the band ending pretty much right where they began.

Overall, Further Still has its moments, but it still doesn’t really elevate Bosse-de-Nage much as major players in American black metal. For me, after listening to this album over and over again, I felt it to be almost too blackgaze, especially the guitars. From start to finish, the guitars on the album do almost nothing but quickly strum the typical blackgaze chords, and in their most common progressions. There isn’t really any major deviation from that, and the highlights on the album are just when the band find something worth applying that one-coat covering to (and there is plenty of material on the album where it doesn’t adhere well or it’s not applied well). At this point in their artistic trajectory, I think Bosse-de-Nage should be doing more to expand their sound or at least do better to hone what talents they have, and hopefully they do next time.