A third album is a special milestone: how do you meet expectations without stagnating? Shaârghot are no strangers to expectations. The industrial metal band had established itself as a little monster to keep a close eye on right from the start, combining ultra-efficient music with a strong universe and memorable stage performances that bring all this dystopian mayhem to life. The last few years haven't exactly been kind ones for these oiled-up madmen. Yet everything was going so well: the second album propelled Shaârghot into new spheres with its apocalyptic heaviness, gigs followed gigs, venues grew... until the world stopped and confined itself. No more music, bye-bye planned tours. Everyone suffered, but Shaârghot found itself stopped in mid-flight. Against this backdrop, Volume III leaps out at us with a cry from the heart: Let Me Out.
Locked up, the beast couldn't stand still. We understand it. This tension is felt right from the intro, with its zapping of voices evoking creatures from the depths just waiting to reach the surface. Threat, urgency, cinematic sound design as immersive as ever: it hasn't even started yet, and we already know it's going to be hard-hitting. Above all, from the very first moments, we sense the enormous leap forward that sound has taken. Massive, monumental but also impeccably clean: Shaârghot has gained in precision and breadth without becoming sterile. When all this accumulated tension finally explodes, it's deliverance. Let Me Out, as we used to say, is like a cry from the heart. "Everything is rotten around me" whispers Shaârghot as an appetizer for what's to come. The stage is set: blacker than ever, the monster no longer has the same smile and exudes despair from the outset. Behind the spontaneity of the steamroller, the haunted keyboard, the atomic double-pedal, the raging techno beats, the frenetic rhythm that goes for the jugular and drips with a panicked urgency unheard of in Shaârghot, grab you by the guts.
We had no worries about the power of the result. Shaârghot know what it's like to shrivel us up with their square-tempo indus slayings. Fans won't be disappointed: there's plenty to do, and the whole thing hits like never before (Red Light District, Great Eye, Love and Drama for Great Audience, impossible to resist). As the tracks progress, you'll notice the same playful pleasure: there's no shortage of musical quotations. Imagine a cross between Slipknot, Korn and Mick Gordon's compositions? You'll get it with Life and Choices. Choruses taken from Combichrist? That's Great Eye. A dirty sample of Manson's Kinderfeld? Take Love and Drama for Great Audience. There's no shortage of examples to illustrate one thing: Shaârghot has fun and, rather than slavishly copying its models, knows how to devour them with appetite, digesting them and incorporating them naturally into its universe.
Pleasure is perhaps one of the key words on the album. The pleasure of trying new things, like this rap scansion over Jump beats. The further we get into Volume III, the more Shaârghot has fun surprising us. The last part is a real turning point. Ghost in the Walls, an atmospheric instrumental transition with a spectral ambience both creepy and strangely poetic, reminds us of Sonic Area's marvellous Music For Ghosts. Arco Trauma (Chrysalide, Sonic Area), an incredible goldsmith who is as discreet as he is brilliant, produces the album and adds his own touch here and there, explaining the new richness of the sound. With Chaos Area, Shaârghot has fun perverting shamanic incantations à la Heilung. Industrial is tinged with tribal mysticism as the violence builds to a crescendo.Just when you think you've reached the height of heaviness, they add another ladleful. It's enormous, and the link between trance and alienation by machines works like a charm. "Are You Ready", the band asks us towards the end of the album. Don't look for it, you're not: the track takes us in a nostalgic direction, bordering on kitsch with an electro/hardcore backdrop, and Shaârghot, in this precarious balance on the edge of cheesiness, achieves a state of grace in an unexpected register. It took audacity to attempt something so daring, and the gamble paid off handsomely. As if that weren't enough, Something in my Head opens up even more doors, mimicing Pain's gimmicks and concluding the album on a note that's both melancholy and epic, a poignant, bittersweet thing that lodges itself in the corner of your head to haunt you for a good while, with vocals that are once again unheard of.
If there's one thing to remember about Volume III, it's its emotional impact, even more than the monumental power of the music, the impressive progress made, the deeper immersion and the delightful winks. When you think of Shaârghot, you think of that demented smile that springs from the darkness. Here, the grin is more bitter than ever, with negative feelings bubbling to the surface like the Shadows invading the Hive City. In the image of Sick, for example, unhealthy and heartbreaking, it's useless to resist this wave of darkness that overwhelms us. There's much less laughter, and in this less sneering, disillusioned tone, ranging from hatred to despair to melancholy, Shaârghot has never seemed such an intimate project, so viscerally necessary for its creators and, consequently, so necessary, touching and powerful.
Volume III: Let Me Out is an album of ambition and modesty that commands respect. It takes a certain humility to assume the role of entertainer, borrowing from left and right to please and entertain his audience. From this point of view, Shaârghot is an exceptional craftsman, in the noblest sense of the word, with exceptional generosity. But there's also the richness of each track, teeming with ideas, with something always happening to renew the pleasure rather than mechanically repeating a pattern for the duration of two verses and three choruses. Above all, despite its borrowings, Shaârghot has never given so much of its guts and soul. In a genre too often reduced to the Germanic clones of the NDH scene, with its hackneyed, lazy clichés, Shaârghot is a salvific UFO, with its visceral rage and its desire to go all out, all the time, to push every desire to its paroxysm, to combine ultra-violence with festivity, wild pleasure with suffering, fiesta with apocalyptic destruction.
What if, in the end, by combining the theatrical power and production quality of a blockbuster with this very personal madness, by achieving this rare balance between an accessible, enjoyable product, but also one of real depth and overflowing with inspiration, Volume III: Let me Out was one of the most satisfying industrial metal albums in a long, long time? For us, there's no doubt about it: they'd already won us over in the past, but with this third album, Shaârghot have entered the big leagues with a bang. And they're going to have to push back the walls, because this tornado is likely to quickly atomize them too
