Déhà is a Belgian solo artist who plays in a vast multitude of bands, across a variety of styles. In his solo work alone he spans a wide range of genres. This album is his 26th, (I think).
Decadanse was unleashed into the world back in March, so I’m a bit late to this particular party, but what an insanely madcap and enjoyable party it is!
How to best describe Decadanse…
Let’s start with the basics. It contains just two songs, but has a total duration of 45 minutes. Both epic-length tracks are entire worlds unto themselves, and are shockingly strong and engaging works.
You could loosely term this black metal. It is, and that’s certainly the base style, if you can say it has such a thing, but it’s also more than that. This blackened core is spliced with hearty helpings of doom for a start. So far, so simple sounding. However, within this though there are a huge amount of of different creative ideas and styles incorporated into the music, everything from grindcore, industrial, avant-garde, operatic, symphonic elements, to electronica, trance, and even some rap. The amazing thing about it though is that not once does Decadanse sound disjointed or too much; all of the various parts are skilfully woven together by an artist with the sort of vision and talent to see through something like this to its very successful conclusion.
Okay, in simpler terms, I’d roughly describe this as what Anaal Nathrakh might sound like if they leaned into the old-school Dimmu Borgir symphonic style and then exploded with rampant, yet controlled, experimentation. The end result is an extreme metal tour de force, and is definitely one of the year’s highlights for me.
Decadanse is such a high quality, individual, and multifaceted album. It contains more ideas than many bands have in their career, and better executed too.
This is just shockingly good. I almost missed this, so make sure you don’t. All I can say is that I urge you to please listen to it as many times as you can. For fans of non-standard extreme metal, this is essential.
Wonderbox Metal 