Melting Zang by Testlôs
A meditative dream journey
Cold, urban, stark, escapist - these keywords were often attributed to the music of Lantlôs in the past. Now with the band's fourth album "Melting Sun", many things change on different levels: After Neige's (Alcest) amical departure, Markus Siegenhort is solely responsible for the (by now only clean) vocals and has gathered a complete line-up for the very first time. These changes in personnel go along with a pleasant paradigm shift: Whereas in the past, the sound used to be chill and at times forbidding, "Melting Sun" paints warm, oneiric vistas in bright hues, where dream mingles with reality and all details merge into majestic entities of colour and shape.
Thus, escapism is still essential to Lantlôs' work, albeit under reverse conditions. With their new album, the group has created a meditative dream journey with a perfect visual counterpart in artist Pascal Hauer's impressive illustrations. "Melting Sun" turns out to be a relaxed summer record between Post Metal and Dream Rock that, although it presents the gist of Lantlôs in a new musical form, remains characteristic, profoundly honest and - most of all - enthralling.
Lantlôs are a musical chameleon. As one of the very first Post-Black Metal bands and co-founders of the scene, their premier releases clearly belong to that genre. With their second offering ".neon" (2010) – the first with Neige from Alcest as vocalist and band regular –, Lantlôs even released a central album of Post Black Metal, considered by many to be a work of reference for that style.