Silhouette is a band that combines the harsh vocals and jagged riffing of black metal with lush, ethereal female vocals and layered, buzzy guitars on their album Les Retranchments. It is not a new formula to combine clean and harsh singing on a black metal album, though in this case the female vocals and dreamy guitars are not far removed from shoegaze, so you might call what Silhouette are doing "blackgaze", a hybrid genre I haven’t run across before. I can’t say anything on this album is a revelation or is driving me to find more music in this vein, as I’ve heard lots of these elements before, though not in the same song. I can say that on songs like "Les Retranchements", Silhouette use the diametrically opposed tortured rasps and lilting clean vocals to effectively conjure up a haunted, unsettling atmosphere that is like walking in a darkened graveyard at night. I wanted to give this a fair listen as it seems like synthesizers are encroaching on metal more and more these days, with terms like "dungeon synth" popping up, and I felt like it was time to see if there was anything to it. Silhouette undoubtedly plays black metal and black metal does seem to be a genre you can tack non-metal music on to (folk, for instance) and come up with something potentially interesting.
