The French veterans who were already cutting speed metal into vinyl in 1985 came back on 17 October 2011 with Immortel, fourteen tracks and nearly fifty seven minutes, twelve of them sung in their own language, much of it recorded live, with seven-string guitars, and they went at it like a demolition crew that has been told the building is condemned and the paperwork is optional. It is fast. It is dark. It is too long.
ADX have a history that reads like a French metal survival manual. Exécution in 1985, La Terreur in 1986, Suprématie in 1987, then Weird Visions on Noise in 1990, sung in English, then the silence. They came back with Résurrection on XIII Bis in 1998, reformed a second time in 2006, made Division Blindée in 2008, re-recorded La Terreur as Terreurs in 2010, and then came home to XIII Bis for this one. Phil Grélaud sings. Pascal "Betov" Collobert and Bernard-Yves Quéruel play guitar, Claude "Klod" Thill bass, Didier "Dog" Bouchard drums.
They changed studio for it. Out went the people who had made their two previous records, in came Fred Rochette at P'n'F Studio, a man whose own band Epsylon shared a label with ADX back in 1985. The engineer whose own band had shared their label in the eighties recorded it with Manu "McFly" Ducros and mastered it himself, and the digipack carried a bonus DVD of their 2009 Raismesfest set.
C'est une nouvelle version d'ADX pour 2011.
Betov, La Grosse Radio, 3 November 2011
That new version is darker and heavier than Division Blindée, and the riffing is the real thing: fast, sharp, French speed metal that slices through a song like a circular saw through a pine plank. The choruses stick, too. You will catch yourself singing words you cannot translate.
The best of it is near the end. "Le carnaval des lâches", an old-school thrash song about a lynching, has the most power of anything here and the most surprises. "Le dernier geste", about executioners, is the one that sounds like it has always been in their set. "Les larmes du diable" goes melancholic and rides one of the catchiest choruses on the record. "Pachydermus" splits the room: a heavy riff and a closing acceleration that tramples everything flat, or a song chopped up by its own breaks. I hear the riff.
The thread through the whole record is death by appointment. "Messe rouge" follows a condemned man through the ritual before his execution, "Le dernier geste" stands beside the executioner, and "Le carnaval des lâches" watches a crowd do the job itself. The subjects are history, fantasy and a streak of the morbid, and this album spends most of its hour on the scaffold. For a speed metal record that could have been about nothing at all, that spine matters. It gives fourteen songs a reason to stand in the same line, even when two or three of them should have stayed in the rehearsal room.
Fourteen songs is a lot of executions for one evening, even for a band this good with the blade.
Then the cracks. Dog writes a great many breaks and tempo changes into these songs, and in places they cut the momentum instead of building it; the title track and "Baptême de sang" never quite catch fire. Phil's voice is the other weak point: it strains in the high register, sometimes sounds laboured, and sits too far back in a mix that is clean and modern to the point of feeling a little cold. And fourteen tracks is two or three past what this material can carry. The good ones in this genre end before you check the clock. This one lets you check it.
So who needs it? Anyone with a soft spot for the European speed metal of the eighties, and anyone who thinks French is a language metal cannot be sung in. Cut it down to eleven or twelve songs on your own player, open with "Le carnaval des lâches", close with "Le dernier geste", and you have a record that deserves its title. Leave it at fourteen and you have a very good band refusing to edit itself.