SETH

Amidst black metal's many diversions and mutations, SETH have held firm for nearly 30 years. Mainstays of an always intriguing French scene, these Bordeaux-based blackhearts have made a virtue of their myopic focus with albums that commandingly occupy the amorphous space between abominable rawness and lustrous, melodic grandeur. In particular, their 1998 debut "Les blessures de L'âme" is a much cherished benchmark for French extremity.

While "La France des Maudits" is clearly a more sophisticated, well-produced and cohesive piece of work, in keeping with the band's most recent efforts, the spirit of deviant defiance still flows through it. The album is an unstated acknowledgement that some ideas are simply too good to abandon, and that SETH have this stuff coursing through their shared, compositional veins.

There are many bands out there doing extraordinary and subversive things with black metal, but SETH spend their sixth full-length refining and polishing their own intensely focused vision of what the genre should be. The opening "Paris des Malefices" showcases a fantastic overall sound, wherein the tempestuous and the majestic repeatedly clash heads. "La Destruction des Reliques" takes that turbulent symbiosis even further: downbeat and despondent, and yet awash with blastbeats and ambient horror, it is a purposeful encapsulation of everything SETH have been toying with over their long history. Stained with the dark romance of gothic metal, it is simply one of the finest songs of its kind so far this year.

Elsewhere, SETH become bolder and more extravagant. "Insurrection" is a grisly and gristly rush of blastbeats and war-hungry discord, stretched out across seven minutes, and executed with great finesse. The balance between all-out violence and ornate, detailed musicality is just about perfect. Similarly, "Le Vin du Condamné" is a wild and dramatic epic that revels in malevolent theatricality. Amid howling blizzards of icy riffing, insidious melodies and a startling performance from vocalist Saint Vincent, SETH conjure an almost symphonic atmosphere, employing telling tempo changes to build tension and split-scar hooks that are as quixotic as they are riotous.

A cynic might argue that we have heard all of this before and that SETH are merely consolidating their identity, rather than doing anything particularly original with it. But "La France des Maudits" does what it does precisely and convincingly, and the magic comes from the Frenchmen's noble quest for their own defining artistic statement. At its best, this is vicious, melodic black metal in excelsis.