Saddiction: the title says it all. We know how stifling and despairing Hangman's Chair can be, and it's a real pleasure to come back and snuggle up to the Parisian quartet's melancholy, to curl up in the cold, grey blanket of detachment and renouncement that they sparingly share with us here, comrades of a night crossed under a forgotten bus shelter or at the bend of an alleyway that no streetlight or hope lights up any more. It's a pleasure to hide under your hood to blot out the rest of the world, to plunge back into these abysses of spleen, and to shudder at the thought of reconnecting with this blend of anguished heaviness and ethereal cold-wave influences.
We're not going to deny it: we were hoping to see our four lads continue down the path they've been following for the last ten years, and Saddiction satisfies our hopes. The album begins by knocking us out: in the opening moments of To Know the Night, drummer Mehdi Birouk Thépegnier delivers his trademark crushing, reverberating strikes haunted by a thousand spectres. The listener is stunned, dazed, and can begin to lose himself, guided by the wailing guitars that reconcile doom, grunge, hardcore and above all new wave and cold influences. The clouds roll in, swollen by a bass that owes as much to the greyness of the Paris suburbs as to the red bricks of Manchester's working-class neighbourhoods. When it rains, it's not drops but breezeblocks that knock us out.
Hangman's Chair plunges us into a fog of torment, but does so with an unprecedented gusto: the post-punk tension of the heady The Worst is Yet to Come (a fine promise) gives it a danceable edge: imagine a crossover between Killing Joke and the depressing jinx of Alice in Chains, or The Cure taking on heavier things. Strangely enough, as it cools down like never before, Hangman's Chair seems less oppressive: the idea of ending it all is caressed like the promise of hope, an escape, a light filtering through the concrete. 2 A.M. Thoughts, featuring Raven Van Dorst from DOOL, is an anthem as devastating as it is unifying. The two projects, which share the same taste for wandering, melancholy, nuance and doom temptations, were made to meet, and the result lives up to expectations. "Ain't that a lovely way to go?". Guys, this one's going on our funeral playlist straight away.
Dark ideas, urban labyrinths, soaring atmospheres. Millions of souls crammed in, locked up, condemned. Hangman's Chair leaves its Parisian suburb to evoke memories of the Kowloon Walled City with Kowloon Lights. Cédric Toufouti's heart-rending wails emerge from the blocks of flats, Julien Chanut's guitar sobs, the horizons are blocked. Hangman's Chair know better than anyone how to shake things up with just a few chords, a simple riff: they save the show-offs for the stage act, here everything is at the service of emotion. The apocalypses are personal, when, in the last tremors of agony, the last hiccup of a dying man or the last stones of an avalanche of misery, the band delivers its final uppercuts after having drowned us in its introspective layers (In Disguise and its conclusion or the bludgeoning of Neglect, both merciless).
Yet in its final moments, Saddiction seems less downcast, and 44 YOD and Healed? exude a kind of bittersweet acceptance. The question mark at the end of the last track, a masterful doom/post-punk conclusion that is both definitive and forward-looking, provides a nuance: what if, rather than gettif rid of their depression, Hangman's Chair managed to find common ground with it? A resignation somewhere between defeat and appeasement, we just 'get on with it' until we can't take it any more. The light at the end of the tunnel has the pallor of neon, it doesn't warm you up, but at least it lets you see something. That's what it's like to grow old: to wander until you forget where you're going, to gain height like a soul leaving existence. The blackness fades and becomes grey, the grey of the sky, the grey of the concrete, the grey in the eyes and in the heart. Since things aren't going to get any better and we're going to let our carcasses wander for a while yet, we might as well travel with this sadness and make a friend of it, the famous 'saddiction' that gives the album its title. It's a cruel comfort, but that's the only kind of comfort Hangman's Chair can provide. Saddiction, on the other hand, touches on the sublime in all its nuances, in the way it fully embraces its spleen, with this new-found peace in defeat.
