Untitled With Drums |Made Flesh |Season Of Mist

Untitled With Drums is a quartet from Clermont-Ferrand, France, made up of Martin Le Borgne on bass and vocals, Lucas Delay on guitar, Nicolas Zalachas on keyboards and Rémy D. Perrin on drums. Their friendships go back more than a decade, and the reformation as a quartet left the lineup closer than before. The band has played Hellfest in 2022, Nuits de Fourvière and Desertfest in London, and opened for Deftones, all while working a mix of alt rock and 90s post-hardcore in a French heavy scene that too often settles for crude aggression.

"Made Flesh" is their second album, ten tracks over close to forty minutes on Season Of Mist, captured at Halle du Jeu de Paume in Vic-le-Comte with Etienne Marchal adding extra guitars. Cyrille Gachet, whose credits include Fange, Year Of No Light and The Great Old Ones, produced and mixed it, and Alan Douches, who has mastered Dillinger Escape Plan, Every Time I Die and Converge, finished the job. Those names explain the full low end and the guitars with size, while the vocal of Le Borgne sits inside the band and the keyboards of Zalachas add color in the background. The songs are short, most end before the four minute mark and "Been So High" is over at three flat, so the pace stays up and nothing drags. Perrin and Le Borgne lock together as a rhythm section and Delay shapes the melodies, a playing level that shows a band used to each other.

The running order is easy to follow: three short tracks up front starting with "Above My Head", the longer ones in the middle with "Gray", "Space" and "Change For You", a short run through "Oblivious", "Parasitic" and "Been So High", and "Cry" to close. The points are lost on originality. "Shame" and "Oblivious" share the same tempo and shape, and the middle stretch from "Matter" to "Space" needs a bigger change in dynamics than it gets. In a scene short on risks, the band takes some, and they do not separate the tracks from one another. A good album for anyone who wants melody with real size behind it, and one that falls short of great.

|7.0