Every even-numbered year is greeted with the delicious certainty of a new Sieben album. 2024 is no exception: Brand New Dark Age follows Ten Hymns for Modern Times with ten new dissections of our world, butchered by the razor-sharp electric violin (it has a name: Kev) and scathing irony of Matt Howden, a bard with the same jubilant bite and poetry.
A new dark age, then? We're back in the early Middle Ages, but more modern. Obscurantism is retained, but technology is added: perhaps this is the explanation, the justification or even the excuse for this artwork, so Windows 3.1! In terms of music, Sieben continues along the same path explored since 2020 Vision and the "arrival" of Kev: with Ten Hymns for Modern Times, we found Sieben more heavy and electronic than ever. This feeling is confirmed by the heaviness of Fuzzageddon, an opener of menacing industrial coldness. Clinical, Sieben slices and dissects. Howden, narrator, declaims. Kev, for his part, sings and laments, but also becomes more squeaky and grating. Oppressive bursts of noise emerge, while the instrument fully justifies its status as Sieben's "second member", as it seems to have inspired Howden in recent years.
The poet-druid Howden not only delves deeper, but above all experiments. Following Sieben over the years is like observing the artist's trials in real time, an alchemist playing with his material, twisting it to extract oddities in a playful movement, like pieces taking shape loop after loop. Mystery has given way to a kind of rage that can be heard in the dissonance, irony and intensity of Ads 4U and its consumerist frenzy, for example, or in the outbursts of Snow Burial. While melodies may not lead the dance as much as before in Sieben (the rhythms are not lacking in drive, take Feel the Fever or Artificial Intelligent for example), this does not prevent melancholy from suddenly expressing itself with an ever-present beauty (What do I Know and, once again, this industrial coldness blending with a twilight groove).
Sieben's momentum continues. In addition to the striking beauty of his music and his assaults on the nonsense of our world, which he stopped disguising long ago behind poetic metaphors, we're also fascinated by the impression of seeing Howden's music mutate before our very eyes, under the scalpel strokes of this minstrel and mad scientist who turns Sieben into an ever-evolving laboratory. Behind the continuity (Brand New Dark Age follows the form of its predecessors, to the point of once again offering live versions of each track), Matt Howden's project is also a mutant monster with ever so seductive deformities.
