Live Review: Alcest, Illyria, Bolt Gun

Given the almost unique quality of Alcest's music, gathering a supporting cast couldn't have been easy, but it was another deftly curated night by Life Is Noise, as a rare performance from Bolt Gun got things underway. With band members spread interstate, they nonetheless exhibited effective chemistry in a set where each song merged into the next to create one unified piece. Their night was highlighted by the efforts of their lead vocalist, who executed deep knee bends in order to launch soul-ejecting screams from the depths of his spleen.

Intensifying things markedly, the three-guitar storm of Illyria captured all the hypnotic droning of truly black metal. There was an unexpected moment of vulnerability when vocalist Ilija Stajic dedicated Swansong to his recently departed grandmother. Naturally enough, they climaxed with a self-described "heavy one," specifically God Of Chaos, which was lapped up by a crowd roughly the size of Alcest's.

Politely humble almost to the point of shyness, Alcest's founder and leader Neige, aka Stephane Paut, was about as far from a showboating rock star as you can imagine, and all the more refreshing for it. Their sound was an exploration between the two opposing poles of black metal and ethereal shoegaze. Paut lamented that it had been six years since their last visit and confessed in between songs to being somewhat exhausted after a long tour, but there were few signs of it as the anthemic Autre Temps drew a spontaneous wave of syncopated handclapping. The attentive audience was clearly enthralled as the respectful hush for and after the intimate spectacle of Paut's tenderly weighted and unaccompanied solo was almost unimaginable for what was essentially a metal gig. Which genre Alcest fits into may still be up for debate, but the escapist nature of the music made it easy to imagine we were all in a wholly other place as auxiliary guitarist Zero, aka Pierre Corson, headbanged in slow motion, his hair bobbing in gentle plumes like the tendrils of a jellyfish undulating under the purple and aqua spotlights.

A one-song encore of Percees De Lumiere and everything seemed to be over all too soon, as if time and space had temporarily dissolved, only to reform and snap us back into reality at the end of an epic dream of somewhere far, far away.