My probably blasphemous view on black metal is that it’s best compared to chicken, not fish. That is to say–don’t serve that shit raw. Oh, I know the proud history of this genre of ours, but good production makes it all the better. Still, I’ll try anything twice, so when looking for something to take my mind off of some food poisoning, something described as emotive melodic raw black metal sounded right . That something was Mordoré by Turpitude, the one woman project of the incredibly prolific Alice Simard.
Mordoré came very much as advertised. Fuzzy tremolo melodies soar and fall from the get go. There is furious drumming, although most of it disintegrates in the noise like a dumpling left too long in soup. There’s enough of it to give a sense of momentum to the guitars though and really, that’s all Turpitude needs. Simard has a clear gift when it comes to melody and, while her production harkens back to the 90s, her ideas are more diverse. There’s traces of shoegaze here, particularly in the middle of “Peintre”. The ending of “La traverse mordorée” is very reminiscent of mid-era Amon Amarth. Then there’s the cover of Mitski‘s “Washing Machine Heart”, a song that in its original conception is very much moody indie. Here it is maybe the most furious song on Mordoré, raw noise around a melody that is maybe just about recognizable as being related to the original. It’s the sort of moment that’d be easy to mock if it didn’t feel intentional. Turpitude are presenting emotions with deliberate, not accidental, crudity.
I make no bones about wishing Mordoré wasn’t so crude. That the album had a more expansive production to help showcase all the melody and emotions that Turpitude do so well. But this is what Simard wanted to do and she made it work. Mordoré isn’t my thing, it won’t stay in the rotation, but it’s good enough that I want to flag it for people whose thing it is. So if you’re full of turpitude and like your black metal raw, go give Mordoré a spin.
