In many ways, you don’t need any more records this year than this one. It is a veritable melting pot of contrasting styles and vastly different musical personas. It is extraordinarily well versed in the diverse nature of our world but it is also flagrantly and unapologetically disregarding any of the walls that may exist between them. It is happily trying to be everything, anywhere, all at once and it very much succeeds in doing so.

Slift hail from Toulouse and continue that current French tradition of playing very hard and loose with metal’s traditional boundaries. “Ilion” is a sprawling psychedelic infinite mess of an album. It is an out-of-body experience captured on vinyl. It is exhilarating and expansive and for eighty incredible minutes just wanders off in an infinite loop of flights of fancy.

There’s nothing as mundane as repeated verses or choruses. Instead, over eight tracks it just lounges out in a million different directions happily moving from one off-kilter non-linear expanse to another. It is defiantly unrelenting, and it magnificently offsets the light with the shade.

 The key here is the musical abilities of the three members. In less skilled hand this could have turned into an utter unlistenable muddle. But they frequently pilot the ship to the point that the inconsequential flow together to create this astonishing musical stream of consciousness. An utter and unashamed triumph.

Read More