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Eighteen years after Chapitre I, Manylaethurius' solo act Terragon is back with the follow-up, Chapitre II: Baudelaire. Black metal and French writer Baudelaire make for strange bedfellows, but Manylaethurius managed to make this marriage work in a majestic way. If you're looking for raw and/or speedy black metal, you can stop reading now. This is atmospheric black metal to the core and this is not the kind of stuff that will get you bang your head.

The vocals are especially notable, varying between harsh and clean singing and also a lot of spoken text, all delivered in a dark and powerful way, really bringing all the songs to a different level; I keep coming back to "powerful" when thinking of the vocal delivery on this album. Side note, this is all sung in French – I believe the only English word I heard was "remember." Musically, with this being atmospheric black metal, as you might expect this is rather slow-paced and ominous with lots of keyboards (very tastefully used) and a lot of it doesn't really qualify as "metal" per se, but the music is so dark, powerful (here's that word again) and entrancing that it puts a lot of metal out there that's trying to sound evil to shame. The overall atmosphere is extremely melancholic and, as I mentioned at the beginning of the review, it's downright majestic. Words cannot do this album justice.