Although Déhà’s creativity is something that is really hard to circumscribe or quantify, Imber Luminis seems to have become the main project for the Belgian musician in recent times. With this latest full length entitled Contrasts, we are given a new formidable example of music that has an emotional impact and is also rich in lyrical content. After having drawn on the work of Sartre with the previous Nausea, here Déhà is inspired by Baudelerian poem Le Voyage, which is part of the most famous collection of the great transalpine, The Flowers Of Evil. The literary giant taken as a conceptual reference point thus changes, but certainly not the approach that admirably blends the roughness of post-black with a melodic approach admirable for its fluidity and intensity. The three long parts that bear the name of the album add up to about an hour of sublime music, with a well-established pattern as a harbinger of powerful emotional gashes, which sees Déhà declaiming the lyrics by means of a torn scream in his native language (he is a French-speaking Belgian), overlapping a sound carpet of incomparable beauty, able to annihilate for evocative power any attempt at imitation in the field of depressive and post metal. To speak of the three parts of Contrasts, entitled Le Voyage, treating them as if they were normal tracks in the setlist of any record would be an unforgivable misunderstanding: the work is in fact and only one, unique and magnificent demonstration of artistic and musical sensitivity. If with Nausea the painful inner discomfort arose from the awareness of an existential chasm, into which fate has thrown us, Baudelaire’s journey is actually the constant search for a place that does not exist except in our mind, which is not always easy to come to terms with. The pathos never fails at any moment and, on the contrary, seems to mount steadily, just as the awareness of not being able to escape from one’s own painful feelings grows, if only partially, thanks to the cathartic power of music. The music by Imber Luminis possesses exactly these characteristics, where anger, emotion, yearning and all the feelings that swirl in our ego produce that restlessness and that underlying melancholy that represent the true meeting point between the musician and those who take pleasure from his inspiration. Contrasts is another piece of an artistic journey that shows no signs of letting up and if, as we said, Imber Luminis seems to be Déhà’s most important project at the moment, we know very well that it won’t be long before we find the multiform Belgian dealing with another genre and another label without the quality of the contents suffering in the least.

2018 – Naturmacht Productions