Phileas — Chapitre 1: La Chute Review

The Threshold of the Fall

The moment the listener presses play, the opening hymn, Au Commencement, greets them with a purely instrumental invocation. It serves as a threshold — a breath of atmospheric stillness — before the record transitions into the remaining eight hymns.

This opening acts as a cinematic prologue, establishing the emotional stakes for La Chute. 

It is the calm before a descent that promises to be both expansive and deeply narrative.

A Descent Without Resistance

Do not let the brief, two-minute opening hymn mislead you; Chapitre 1: La Chute is a forty-minute descent into a specialised form of black metal. It is a dark fruit of art — melodic yet bleak, it swaps pure aggression for a pervasive sense of the depressive and the introspective.

Thesound is notably dry and gritty, eschewing the polished sheen of modern recordings for a texture that feels tactile and weathered. This sonic choice serves perfectly the album’s emotional core, which carries that unmistakable French black metal tension.

This is not a record that attacks; it is a record that haunts, capturing a melodic sorrow that is as gritty as it is graceful.

The Geometry of Damnation

The conceptual heart of Chapitre 1: La Chute is built upon the harrowing geometry ofPeter Paul Rubens’The Fall of the Damned. 

The music does not attempt to depict the tortures of hell itself; instead, it inhabits the precise, agonising moment when salvation becomes an impossibility. The bodies in Rubens‘ work are not yet being punished — they are simply, irrevocably lost. Phileas captures this irreversible movement toward the abyss with a sonic palette that mirrors a total spiritual collapse.

The album is constructed as a single, continuous descent — an uninterrupted fall into the dark. 

The musical progression follows this descent with chilling accuracy — 

The Glimmer — it begins with a faint, fragile light (the opening instrumental). 

The Slip — it slowly loses its footing, sliding into a dry, gritty melodicism. 

The Erasure — it culminates in a total descent into darkness and silence.

This is not a collection of hymns, but a single inexorable fall. The music carries the weight of those falling bodies, creating a sense of kinetic dread where the movement itself is the condemnation.

Strings That Collapse Inward

The devilmanship behind Phileas is a solitary labour, resulting in a composition and arrangement that is remarkably solid. As a single-entity project, it carries a focused, singular vision of collapse. 

The guitars are the primary driver of this emotional descent, utilising melodic but bleak riffing that is often built on minor-key tremolo lines. Most impressively, the guitar work employs descending motifs, musically mirroring the album’s central theme of the fall.

These are not just riffs; they are the sonic representation of losing one’s footing and slipping into the abyss. The guitar work is also expressive but pointedly never polished. It is meant to feel human, strained, and collapsing. The riffs shift between cold, mid-paced marches — capturing the sombre realisation of the descent — and frantic passages, evoking the panic of the irreversible slide toward the dark.

The guitar tone is dry, gritty, and unvarnished, matching the intentionally raw production of the record. There is no studio magic here to hide the pain; it is a naked, tactile sound. The bass is mixed with restraint, serving the narrative of the fall rather than drawing attention to itself — acting as the heavy, silent anchor that ensures the descent remains constant.

Rhythms of the Unavoidable

The drums are either performed or programmed by Lord of Misery, but they are crafted with a deliberate sense of organic reality. By utilising a dry, close-mic production, the percussion reinforces a claustrophobic atmosphere, making The Fall feel intimate and suffocating.

The rhythmic structure of the hymns is defined by straightforward black metal blasts, used sparingly to punctuate the most intense sections of the descent — where rock- and jazz-influenced rhythms appear in the transitions — a sophisticated stylistic choice that separates Phileas from more linear black metal acts.

Ritualistic mid-paced patterns — these dominate the majority of the runtime, providing a steady, hypnotic pulse that guides the listener deeper into the abyss.