Fange Pack A Riotous Good Time Into Their New Album’s Sludgy Death Metal

The new album Pudeur by the brutal French group Fange sounds like pummeling hardcore ferocity, razor-edge metal riffing, and even industrialized distortion mayhem got pitched into a massive blender and spewed out for listening — and it’s awesome. The band feel genuinely exciting to listen to, and at the same time, they’re essentially always gut-punchingly heavy.

The experience of listening to Pudeur feels, in a sense, like observing a perhaps slightly intoxicated hardcore band staggering through some maze of back alleyways, bottles in hand. Or perhaps, in the “world” of this album, a hardcore band has taken over the stage at some normally dance-oriented night club — track three launches into pulsing industrial electronics, and those elements snake into and out of the music numerous times beyond that point. Whatever the exact scenario, Fange have packed Pudeur with just a riotous good time, delivered by their sharp attention to musical detail. There’s no lagging here; instead, every bit jumps out with something new and fresh-feeling as they freely intermingle deranged electronics with death metal riffing performed with an especially hardcore beastliness.

Quite frequently, those mixtures make for some moments that truly pop. The especially lengthy track “Génuflexion” features death metal chugging amplified by a fairly consistent stream of harsh industrial electronics running alongside. They’re never overwhelming and don’t detract from what’s very obviously the main attraction here — the thundering cacophonies of riffs and hammering drum blasts — but rather, these extra elements make the experience of this song and the rest of the album just that much bolder. The pairing of the toughly harsh industrial electronics with directly concurrent, searingly intense streaks of ferociously huge chugging continues on the next song and beyond. Track seven, called “Dieux Gémissants,” ends up featuring almost entirely a teeming mass of industrial electronics that feels like a snowball of razor blades.

Pudeur as a whole feels like a huge, lumbering beast lunging straight for the throat, and there’s such a confident energy in these relentless songs that there’s really no feeling of potential escape. As the album progresses, the feeling of chest-beating ferocity that’s somehow freeing via the rawness of the energy just gets more and more pointed. There’s a super fresh invigoration here, like an internal jolt of adrenaline via lunging straight into the arms of that beast.

5/5 Stars

Check out the music below! It’s available via Throatruiner Records.