Melodies of Glistening Nova: Sylvaine Create Gorgeous Soundscapes at Brick by Brick
October 4th, 2022
Embarking on their 2nd North American tour, Sylvaine’s delicate, yet fiercely passionate Shoegaze-like Metal sound, have the group as main support for Zeal & Ardor, providing music that is certainly detailed, genuine, and depressively joyful.
“Earthbound” opened Sylvaine’s mesmerizing 45-minute performance, with this beautiful off-beat drum intro, accompanied by a delightful fuzzy distortion, and anthem-felt chord progression. The 2nd guitarist, also providing backup vocals, but more of harmonizing and sustaining the higher notes, Florian Ehrenberg’s voice added this layer of sound to the music instead, creating a beautiful dynamic alongside Sylvaine’s wonderous clean singing, and despair-filled screams. Interesting to see the capos on both guitars, it made for the chord changes and clean interludes to be heard in this mindfully distorted musical view, with the standard power chords used for certain transitions, to be felt quite differently.
The introduction to “Fortaph”, demonstrated the level of lasting harmony, and thoughtful imagination, with those ringing notes capturing the attention of the audience absorbing Sylvaine’s roots. A few minutes into the track, would be one of the band’s most powerful traits: the combination of the Shoegaze-length riffs, enriching, various guitar effects changing the room’s colours, and the haunting, angelic atmosphere of Sylvaine’s vocal work. There will be some sort of Alcest comparison with the band (to be fair, with Sylvaine providing guest vocals in some of their later material), and while on a surface level that claim would be warranted, looking deeper into the music, the differences are more noticeable upon further listens.
“Mono No Aware”, arguably the most high-tempo and aggressive song in the set, engaged the crowd from the opening drum beat and pounding fills from Dorian Mansiaux. Grinning from ear to ear, and simultaneously creating hard-hitting downbeats to accompany the power of Sylvaine’s voice and in this track, a sonically assaulting Black-Metal influence, particularly 3-minutes in, this showed off Dorian’s abilities greatest. Although I initially thought Maxime Mouquet’s bass volume could have been turned up, it sounded like that wasn’t the intention for how the band operates. Instead, Maxime’s bass felt it was giving the guitars itself a slight boost, and not working in usual theory with the drums. His presence packed a punch for the guitars and didn’t overwhelm the delicate passages of the music.
Sylvaine’s gorgeous tones, sonically aggressive riffs, and the riveting singing, vocal work, wowed the audience. Seeing the merch table packed after the show, it was no surprise they made new fans tonight, including myself. Beautiful soundscapes provided by Sylvaine.
1. Earthbound
2. Abeyance
3. Fortaph
4. Mono no Aware
5. Morklagt
