Miseria, released on January 23, 2024, is the third album from Osculum Serpentis (Maxime Taccardi), following Maleficia, released in August 2023, and The Curse of the Vampyre, released last October. A dark and disconcerting vampiric black metal project, Osculum Serpentis nevertheless offers us a more personal experience of its author, far from the Japanese myths of Kyuketsuki, or the pure illustration that is K.F.R.
From the very first notes, we sense a sincere synergy, an interaction between the author and the chaos. The guitars on Le noir Poème or Lumière écarlate oscillate between balance and imbalance, dissonance and harmony, haste and numbness. It's as if there's a slide into madness after each discordant beat within these infernal loops, marked by worn-out voices (the heart-rending moans of Sentence) that suck up our energy as much as they breathe it into us. If the whole creates an allegorical fable of human nature and its constant decadence mired in self-destruction and melancholy, it also gives meaning to this life, inherent in its abyssal din. The track Charogne de mon être, Odeur de ma vie is illustrated by the author's drawings in a video that we hope will not (yet) be the object of an unfortunate deletion by the giant machines of the web, because it would be a shame to live this introspective ordeal without it.
The lyrics, written entirely in French, Maxime Taccardi's mother tongue, bring us even closer to the beauty of the ravaged words bled from his pen. While each album contains a masterful morsel that stands out a little more from the others (the beautiful instrumental God forgot about me on the previous album is well worth a listen), on this one it's Le chant du cygne, with its petrifying poetic darkness, that's not to be missed. The superb text is available from the author here.
This work, which ends with a talented instrumental score, is a mirror on the hell of our world, but it also proves to be a life companion as dark as it is comforting. It would seem that the author's ardent and ever-growing inspiration will be with us for a long time to come, in what seems like a brief eternity.
