Review: Mono/Alcest, Marble Factory

It’s not unusual to come across a co-headlining show where one band is effortlessly superior to the other. Less frequent is the situation where the inferior act has to follow the better one night after night. But that seems to be the fate of Japanese instrumental quartet Mono on this peculiar tour.

Having won plenty of fans while supporting Opeth, France’s Alcest are clearly the main attraction for most of this diverse audience. “We love you!” bellows one possibly over-refreshed chap. “Oh . . . that’s nice,” responds gangling, thoughtful, unfailingly polite and softly spoken frontman/guitarist Neige, with a little embarrassment. It’s fair to say that showmanship is not the quartet’s strongest card. Indeed, for the most part they favour the heads-down hair-flailing approach, rather like a blackgaze version of 1972-vintage Quo. So it’s all about the music, and fortunately that’s utterly sublime: a beautiful, haunting, unique and distinctive blend of shoegaze and black metal that weaves a hypnotic spell when performed live.

For a while, many feared that Neige was on a musical journey that would eventually expunge all the metal elements from Alcest’s music in favour of 4AD-style ‘dream-pop’, leading to a descent into blandness. But their latest – and arguably best – album, the Hayao Miyazaki-inspired Kodama, steps back from the brink and reasserts the striking mix of styles that made the band so special in the first place. We get four of its six tracks tonight, from Onyx via the title track to stunning standout Oiseaux de proie and Éclosion, Neige’s harsh vocals blending brilliantly with live guitarist Zero’s more choirboy-esque tones. Probably their best-known song, the lovely, unapologetically poppy Autre Temps, gets a rapturous reception, but long-term fans are also rewarded with a return to the title track of Alcest’s debut Souvenirs d’un autre monde and Percées de Lumière from Écailles de Lune, which is as close as they get to undiluted metal. Délivrance from the controversial Shelter album proves a bold and inspired set closer, bathing the audience in its grandiose washes of sound.

Frankly, we could have done with another hour of that, but now its Mono’s turn. Touring an album that’s steeped in Japanese culture alongside a band who actually come from Japan must have seemed like an irresistible proposition to Alcest, and their four-piece co-headliners certainly begin impressively enough. A quiet xylophone intro gives way to a gentle guitar figure that builds and becomes louder with a quickening tempo as it propels a dramatic strobe-lit crescendo. Impressive stuff. Here comes the second track. A quiet piano intro gives way to a gentle guitar figure that builds and becomes louder with a quickening tempo as it propels a dramatic strobe-lit crescendo. Now here’s another quiet xylophone intro that . . . you get the picture. Sometimes the music fizzles out rather than reaching a climax. On other occasions, it ceases abruptly or concludes with an extended foray into white noise. Whatever the fashionable category this music belongs in – ‘post-rock’?, ‘leftfield’?, ‘experimental’? – it’s actually just as repetitive and formulaic as chart pop, lacking the creativity and musical dynamism that Alcest bring to the table.

Read more: Metal & Prog picks: November 2016