Pensées Nocturnes - Grand Guignol Orchestra

I have stated my distaste for the overdone try-hard edginess of the dark carnival aesthetic in film and television (and separating the band Avatar from that aesthetic has been a necessary task for me to prepare myself for their music), but something about applying it to the self-aware campiness of metal had me kind of intrigued to see what the exaggerated horror of metal could do for the often butchered scary circus aesthetic. I mentioned not too long ago that metal has always had its foot in parody through excess, and after all, isn’t the whole carnival thing supposed to be excessively cartoonish itself too? Maybe it could work. And that seems to be the hypothesis by which Pensées Nocturnes have approached this album.

Pensées Nocturnes are a french band who have been rather prolific over the past decade, Grand Guignol Orchestra being the group’s sixth full-length album over the course of their decade-long existence. And the band have consistently sought to tinker and experiment with the more highly supplemented style of black metal passed down by the likes of Dimmu Borgir and Emperor, but Grand Guignol Orchestra is definitely their boldest and most out there experimentation with black metal’s orchestral, neo-classical side.

Following through beyond simply the visual aesthetic, the band really does capture on a sonic level the vibe that the album’s cover implies. I had written about The Ogre Packet Slammers’ use of Shrek on their album’s cover potentially to encourage the description of their generic slam as “Shrek metal” when simply using Shrek as part of their subject matter in the format of an established genre probably wouldn’t constitute enough to deem it a whole other genre. But if “circus metal” isn’t already an established obscure subgenre, Pensées Nocturnes may have just done enough to found it with this album, as the warped carnival sounds of wonky horn sections, demented accordion , and freakish jazzy string arrangements serve to add an truly tangible layer of anxiety to the band’s manic black metal instrumental foundation. If black metal is largely differentiated from death metal by way of their featuring of differing vocal techniques, then this album could potentially be differentiated from strict black metal by a similar degree as the already bad-trip instrumental mayhem is all topped off by these tormented clownish howls and shouts, which sometimes feature a touch of psychotic vibrato or even originate from purely campy operatic vocals, that bring the nightmarish carnival aesthetic home.

Indeed, this album really has its aesthetic figured out down to a tee to the point that it could be argued that it’s not really an experimental metal album anymore because it doesn’t feel like an experiment. The band’s experience with neo-classical black metal really helps them structure the songs in ways that give at least a sense of compositional order to organize the sonic aesthetic madness as they mash deathly blast beats and thick blackened guitar riffage with sinister playful whistles and horn sections and campy piano and pipe organ melodies into a twisted, jazzy, metallic fever dream.

Cursory listens for the spectacle of the weird aesthetic might make Grand Guignol Orchestra easy to write off as a novelty album, and the nature of the image of circuses being designed as spectacles to gawk at perhaps contributes to this. But like circuses (in their ideally ethical state) I think that passing this album off as a mere exercise in aesthetic eccentricity is a disservice to the genuine talent on display here. Pensées Nocturnes have clearly spent a lot time intentionally crafting this truly unique sound beyond something simply wacky and attention-grabbing for the sake of it, which I think must be tragically ironic in some way to be overlooked in the same way the talent of the very basis of its distorted aesthetic is, because this really is one of the best albums of the year.

A new species of nightmare/10