For Rebellion: Forteresse’s Rampaging “Lá Oú Nous Allons”

For decades it has baffled you, starting with your little sister’s records by The Softies to your girlfriend’s post-hardcore faves like Funeral For A Friend. It’s distracting, it’s noodly, it’s two main ideas continually competing for your attention. It seems to represent an unwanted guitarist shoehorning his part into a perfectly complete song, a movie’s leads always speaking simultaneously, a traffic cop directing you with one hand to make a left turn while the other hand gestures for you to stop.

What is it? It’s when a guitarist spans a song with meandering, single-note melodies. Usually it’s constant quarter-notes, usually tacet only occasionally for the duration of an album. But for Forteresse, one of an awesome idiom’s most authoritative bands, it kinda works. See “Lá Oú Nous Allons” (below, via Stereogum) from their rampaging new album, Thèmes pour la Rébellion: The drowsy tremolo-picked solo guitar hypnotizes the ear and veils sneaky backing vocals. And anyway, by your third or fourth listen to Thèmes, your attention is gripped by 2016’s most momentous drum compositions. These contribute dynamics, a rejection of the static, a considering of each song’s riffs from different angles — the way perfectly constructed, performed, and captured drums can do.

Forteresse’s fifth album Thèmes pour la Rébellion is out June 24 via Sepulchral. Pre-order here.