WELCOME-X: Welcome-x Vol. 2 (ALTERNATIVE METAL): review / opinion to read on Music Waves

Welcome-X is the project built on the initiative of Philippe Bussonnet (Magma's bass player since 1996) who had expressed, with "Volume 1", his desire for freedom finding its incarnation in a so-called alternative metal. The album was so difficult to approach that it needed several attentive listenings to find out all its richness.

The rather simple cover contrasts once again with the experimental and thorough content of the album. But if the previous album offered long tracks giving free rein to the fertile imagination of its composer, this new part appears more compact with some concise tracks.

The opener 'Thylacine Blues' allows us to enter the album with a long instrumental introduction that plunges the listener into a kind of anxiety that is confirmed by the low vocal lines contrasting with a chorus howled in the Rage Again The Machine. The rhythmic is demonic with its humming and groovy bass. The tracks are impressively rich in the backgrounds with jazz passages that remind in some respects a King Crimson that would have rubbed shoulders with Tool. This complex track is followed by 'Bulleyes' which is more direct, with an overflowing energy where Sam becomes even more furious. Probably inspired by Magma but also by Rush or Pink Floyd, the group offers musical interludes scattered in the album which bring at the same time a surplus of subtlety and escape, sublimating the harmonics of bass and guitar ('Everlasting Light I') while moving in a crimson energy even renewed angelic ('Everlasting Light II').

This prelude gives way to the flagship track of the album, 'Ombromanie', which undoubtedly synthesizes the best of the band while affirming its essence, represented by this jump into the unknown. A sort of emotional rollercoasters, the track is an incandescent and progressive patchwork drawing from hardcore, metal, rock, jazz, all the while managing the feat of remaining coherent thanks to the bass line that plays the role of Ariane's thread in this labyrinthine construction.

The more the album progresses, the more the tracks seem to become complex, drawing the listener into a universe of unsuspected resources. Inevitable Collapse' offers dark verses with a more luminous chorus playing on a contrast effect that was not too present before. As a dessert, the group proposes a '32ge' that Steven WiIson would not have disavowed in "Insurgentes" as it relies on a kind of wall of sound also verging on the post rock.

With this "Volume 2", Welcome-X asserts a little more its style and refines it with a more accessible side, thanks to inventive and present melodies, while not denying its sound laboratory side built around fusional explorations. The album thus appears better balanced, more polished than the previous try, perhaps at the detriment of the spontaneity. Whatever, it is a flagship album of the metal, jazz-rock genre of this year. - Official website

WELCOME-X

WELCOME-X VOL. 2

LE TRITON

ALTERNATIVE METAL