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French band name and album name, French song titles. Must be from France, right? (I thought so...) No, Le Chant Noir are from Brazil. That still doesn’t sound right to me and I’ll have to find more about this, especially since they do sound like their sound has roots in French avant-garde black metal mixed with the early 2000s scene that was the peak of French black metal as far as I’m concerned (thankfully that scene is going through a revival, but that’s another story).

There are quite a few spoken passages on this La Société Satanique des Poètes Morts (which translates to "The Satanic Society of Dead Poets"), by a female voice with impeccable French. Usually spoken passages kind of annoy me, but here they really add a lot to the album’s sound and atmosphere, with an incisive, determined delivery that really comes out and grabs you, forcing the listener to pay attention. Musically this is kind of melodic with an occasional gothic edge, but it’s raw enough to satisfy a wider range of aficionados of the genre. There’s a very tiny bit of Cradle of Filth in terms of style, though haters shouldn’t let that turn them off from checking out this album as Le Chant Noir take the good from the UK stalwarts’ sound and then proceed to do their own thing. I’ve been listening to this album for several weeks and it never feels to reach out and grab me, so it does pack some staying power. This is one of the albums out of hundreds I’ve listened to in 2021 that has caught my attention.