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Grylle is a French band that is claiming to be the first and (currently) only band playing black metal without any distorted guitars, just acoustic instruments. Their debut, Les Grandes Compagnies, is a double album with nearly 75 minutes of music that the label is calling "medieval black metal" but you'll recognize it as being pretty close to pagan metal (sans electricity). Without electric guitars employing black metal's de rigueur tremolo picking, the music on Les Grandes Companies lacks some of the frenetic speed of traditional black metal but they do ramp up the tempo to slightly lesser effect on occasion. The vocals are typical howling rasps interspersed with cleaner singing and the acoustic instruments give the music a feeling of being from a distant past. Grylle's music blends a Cascadian-like atmosphere of times out of mind with the period vibe of, say, Pagan's Reign. Les Grandes Compagnies suffers from having songs that sound a lot like one another and at well over an hour in length, they blend by the end. Les Grandes Compagnies is well suited as background music for your tabletop RPG campaigning but is much less effective in the car.