Band:	Aodon
Album:	Portraits
Style:	Atmospheric black metal
Release date:	June 2023

01. Swen
02. Egon
03. Mayerson
04. Adam
05. Miquella
06. Andreas
07. Liza
08. Inaki
09. Sheelagh

For an album where each song deals with different persons and their different personalities, the atmospheric black metal on Portraits does little to differentiate the songs from each other. First things first, however; Aodon is a French black metal band started by guitarist, drummer, and vocalist M-Kha, who on their third album find a niche blend of atmosphere and black metal, with some doom and gaze undertones to the sound.

Each song on Portraits deals with a person who has succumbed entirely to various psychological traits. The band markets the album as a "gallery" and each song is named after its protagonist. This is an intriguing concept which makes for some great and evocative storytelling, and it is obvious that a lot of thought and love has been put into creating these characters and bringing them to life through the French lyrics. Sometimes abstract to the point of interpretability, the lyrics paint pictures of, for example, the aptly named narcissist "Egon", "Mayerson" who is losing touch with reality, and "Liza" who suffers from child abuse. Other themes include solitude, addiction, and unrequited or lost love, and these concepts do a lot to set the songs apart from each other in my memory.

What doesn't set the songs apart very much, however, is the actual music throughout the album. There is little variation in the melodies, riff patterns, vocals, and overall dynamics, though it bears mention that the band members' performances are all great. The drumming is a highlight of this album, with their noisy production creating a sweet wall of sound behind the rest of the music, and working very well together with the icy vocals. The lead guitar most often plays relatively simple yet sort of intangible, trebly tremolo melodies, and is well-accompanied by a rhythm guitar that has a nice blackened doom crunch to it. Performance- and production-wise, there is nothing to complain about here.

"Swen", who is suffering from solitude and loss, introduces the album nicely, jumping between a sort of raw blackgaze and ascending, mid-paced, doomy sections. The music then never really veers from this formula, which turns out to yield both good and bad results. On the one hand, it makes the album feel like a very cohesive whole, almost as if it were a single, long song which journeys through small variations on the same theme. On the other hand, it makes it hard to truly remember individual songs or sections, as the tracks blend into one another to a large extent.

As a few very similar songs float by, the first moment on Portraits that really catches my attention is the post-rock outro to the fourth song, "Adam", which leads into the neatly sluggish "Miquelle", where the instruments get a chance to breathe and create some well-needed dynamics. Still, a lot of the melodies and riffs build on the same idea, which, as I mentioned earlier, is for both better and worse. In "Liza", a properly evil chord progression and atmospheric interlude makes for one of the more memorable songs, and the music in general, I think, works at its best when going for a more hooky, doomy style than the spacey, gazey sound, which isn't all that memorable.

All in all, your experience with Portraits may vary depending on what you expect. If you're in the mood for music that sets a particular atmosphere and then sticks to its guns and explores various versions of that same idea, this will be for you. It works best as a whole, to allow you some time to succumb to the setting and get drawn into the "gallery", much like the characters on Portraits succumb to the predicaments that define their lives.