Matrass – Cathedrals

Band: Matrass
Title: Cathedrals
Label: La Tangente Label
Release Date: May 17th, 2024
Country: France
Format Reviewed: Digital stream

Something special is emerging from Bordeaux, France. On debut full-length Cathedrals, post-metal-five-piece Matrass demonstrate several things: they understand melody (and know how to deploy it), they’ve got guitar riffs of fire to burn down your house, and most importantly they’ve got boat-loads of soul.

“Post-metal” is an annoying term, don’t you think? Sure, if you’ve ever listened to ISIS or Cult of Luna you have a sense of some of the components. You can expect big, powerful waves of riffs, extended, atmospheric journeys, glacial guitar lines and a certain sense of mournfulness… So why not just call it atmospheric metal!?

Well, anyway Cathedrals has all of the above, but while music falling into that post-metal bracket often has a tendency to focus on the slow build and gradual transitions around a central motif, Matrass choose to play with their approach. This can see the music move between soaring, melancholic noir, chugging-Meshuggah-invoking riffing, modern, melodic-metal and yes, a healthy amount of glistening, glacial guitars.

The band also has something else, the ace up their sleeve, they’ve got vocalist/saxophonist Clémentine Browne and while the woodwind is saved just for the beautiful melancholia of “Silence” (both soothing in its drifting melodies as it is hard-hitting in the pounding of the rhythm section) Browne’s choice of vocal melodies throughout the rest of the album could often easily be imagined delivered through the sax.

She’s got a great voice too (not to mention range!). Just as fluid as the rest of the band is at transitioning between light, darkness, melancholy, frustration, pain and fury, Browne has a vocal tone to fit each twist and transition of the music.

Bookended by the album’s longest and most epic tracks (opener “Shreds” and the closing title track) most of the album’s faces can be found somewhere in these collective 14 minutes. The slow build of “Shreds” takes in gentle, fragile guitars, steady and assured percussive power, chugging syncopation, a shimmering shower of guitar raindrops and an epic finale.

Complementing each phase of the track, Browne is by turns hushed, commanding, soaring, gritty and harsh, before once again soaring alongside the track’s final payoff.

It’s not just Browne’s jazz background that gives the album such a multi-dimensional range of tone and mood, with her soulful melodies, likewise the band’s newest addition, drummer Baptiste Manec, shows himself to be just as adept at deploying jazzy flourishes (for instance on the dynamic “Journey”), as he is providing the hammer blows, when the band decides it’s time to rain down molten metal from above (see “Glimpses”).

To make sure every member of the band gets their due, it’s worth highlighting the stand-out slap bass of the highly atmospheric “Appetite for Comfort”. Meanwhile, for the album’s most gorgeous and beguiling guitar interplay, see the hammer-on-driven melodies of instrumental track “Adrift”.

Let’s petition to get more woodwind and noir in modern metal. On Cathedrals, Matrass delivers both, and more, with aplomb. 9/10 by Tom Osman

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