L'ordure à l'état purby Peste Noire

A work of forbidden genius. If you bother to translate the French lyrics, they will not sit well with social justice warriors. If you can put that aside, what Peste Noire does within the black metal genre is extraordinary. He mixes everything from folk and polka and sound collages with the most martial of metal riffs. It's an album that sounds both beautiful and dangerous. The production is amazing, it has the clarity of a bullet. It's hard to really describe the album. It's epic and operatic without ever seeming pretentious or overblown. The centerpiece is J'avais rêvé du nord (I Had a Dream of the North), a 20 minute track without a single boring note. It's a song that a lot of people would find wildly offensive, and yet it's also heartfelt and oddly moving. I don't even know if you can call it a song, it's something else, like someone took everything of their self, everything beautiful and ugly, all their anger and their hopes, and nailed it to your door, still bleeding.