Briqueville – IIII (Review)

This is the fourth album from Belgian post-metal band Briqueville.

IIII contains 39 minutes of dark, enigmatic music. Briqueville’s style is deeply atmospheric, and IIII is the sort of album that will drag you into the darkness as it hypnotises with its shifting walls of rich mood.

Briqueville specialise in atmosphere, and on IIII they envelope the listener in it completely. This is an album of immersive soundscapes. It’s a journey of hypnotic droning minimalism, as the band build tension with absorbing sounds and deep eerie ambience. There are oceans of malevolent doom that want to suffocate the life out of you as they give rise to structures of bleak intensity and menacing shadow. Amidst these leviathans swim dark, unforgiving post-metal entities, the sort that bite deep and leave scars.

IIII pulses and breathes with sinuous malignancy, as if the music itself is a creature of nightmare origin. The harrowing trip that Briqueville have orchestrated is utterly convincing in its authentic darkness and with its palpable aura of threat, yet also strangely inevitable, as if you were always going to be drawn into its captivating world.

There’s a cinematic appeal here. Briqueville’s music is fiercely emotive, and finely constructed. The album flows from one near-lightless creation to the next, bringing haunting sounds and malicious layered heaviness to the listener in waves of sinister atmosphere. Briqueville demonstrate an easy master of mood-building over these five tracks, with any one of them worthy of your undivided attention. Taken together, IIII is an imposing and impressive proposition.

If you enjoy bands such as Hemelbestormer, Dirge, Amenra, Bong, Isis, Year of No Light, Pelican, Neurosis, Bossk, Cult of Luna, Obscure Sphinx, and Mogwai, then IIII is one you must definitely check out.