A mish mash of noise
Winds of Torment. Nope, not the reaction you have to a particularly hot curry but the debut album from these French thrashers. Apparently the band won a competition and with that they even won themselves a record deal with Mascot Records. Mascot gave them a year to produce some tunes and in April 2007 this resulted in 'Delighting In Relentless Ignorance'. France is perhaps not renowned for its metal output, only 'Out' being the band I can recall from over the Channel, but I'm willing to accept anything as long as it's good and not Polish (I've yet to hear a decent tune from a Polish metal band...my search still goes on.)
'Delighting In Relentless Ignorance' has an immense production, every aspect from the guitar tone, drums, bass, vocal mix is first class and really enhances the bands influences of death/thrash/black metal. The album is jumble of all three aforementioned styles mixing blast beats, fast thrashing guitar licks, death metal growling and overall technical ability. On the whole the throwing around of styles works well and after a while I found myself not particularly worrying about it and listening to the album as a whole.
The musicianship on this album is excellent. Jean Francois machine gun feet really drive the metal with his 'bass drum from hell'. Bertrand and Jerome's guitar interplay is technically superb with riffs varying from the chugginly brutal to the wonderfully widdly, Xavier's vocals are powerful and he regularly shows off his range by giving the listener a guttural growl along with high pitched screaming and just general shouting. There's little in the way of melodic/clean vocals on this disc (in fact there's none) but Xavier makes the best of this situation and delivers a convincing performance.
This all sounds good for Winds of Torment and in many ways it is, but the songs on offer are just too average to get excited about. Six out of the nine songs are either six minutes or over and rather than being sweeping metal symphonies in the style of Machine Head, they are laborious thrash-a-thons that rely on sticking ideas together in the hope that they work. This style of writing does allow for some genuinely brilliant moments, the 3:03 minute mark in 'Devoid of Essence,' at the 1:35 minute mark in 'My Daydreams' Specters' and at 3:14 on 'The Unspoken Pact' are all excellent segments of metal, but that's all they are, segments. I would have loved to have heard these ideas fleshed out into actual songs as they are strong enough to warrant such care and attention. As a result they get lost in the mire of humdum thrashing and the laborious chord/shout formula. Imagine a more brutal version of Mendeed and you'll be in the right ball park. Add on to this an album devoid of guitar solos and other instrumental treats and what's left is a run-of-the-mill mish mash of noise.
For a debut album 'Delighting In Relentless Ignorance' is a solid if dull piece of work. It does require some attention to its song-writing and ideas, there's more to metal than playing a chord and shouting over the top, in fact any idiot can do this, (although many bands around today don't realise this either) and Winds of Torment are stronger when the guitars are chugging hard and the songs themselves have more structure. Having said all that, this is a decent building block for this band and I hope they can find the beginning, middle and end to their songs very soon because at the moment they've lost it.