Proggy French grooovemeisters Klone here return with their third full-length, and casting aside the Jazzy meanderings of previous work All Seeing Eye, they’ve instead narrowed their focus to create a damn impressive album that is somewhere between Meshuggah, Tool and Gojira, hints of Soulfly here and there adding even more colour and breadth to their already broad sound. It’s difficult to sum up easily, as each track takes a mildly different course, and the songs are written with a clear post-Grunge sense of melody also notable in Yann Liger’s Maynard Keenan-gone-gruff singing voice. Don’t expect simplicity, however, as each moment is well-written and fits together snugly, making for an album that soon makes you forget its fifty-minute-plus running time.

Opener Rite Of Passage gently introduces you to the band’s world with Eastern melody, a Tooly build-up that launches into effects-strewn Alt Metal with a clear Progressive drive, sliding along merrily and setting up the slightly more aggressive Spiral Down which increases the atmospheric Meshuggah chug to great effect. The likes of Give Up The Rest increase the melody whilst retaining the riffage, Hollow Way has a nice and complex Avant-Thrash style which reveals its secrets the more you listen, almost touching on Opeth territory, and Immaculate Desire opens like old Isis before slipping into a melancholic mid-pacer that sounds average on first listens but grows immensely. It’s worth noting how skilled the band are, especially drummer Laurent and guitarists Guillaume and Mika, all tight and technical. They play extraordinarily well together, blessed with a complimentary production as well as a great set of songs that form a terrific album.

I could leave it there, really, but it’d be unfair to the band not to stress how good Black Days is. Klone clearly prove that their name has a touch of irony to it as the rocking likes of The Spell Is Cast prove, mixing sombre atmospherics with neck action. There’s a closing Björk cover that will turn heads, and Behold The Silence even approaches radio-friendliness, although this is still several stages of heaviness more than your regular commercial fare. Klone do have commercial viability – heck, they’ve been going since 1995, so it’d be nice to see them finally get a bit of praise from the wider Metal world. Those into the ‘melancholic rock’ likes of Katatonia will appreciate this as much as the alt-proggy Toolheads, yet ultimately Klone are like their countrymen Gojira, a band with enough crossover appeal to gain the ears of a wide audience – something they fully deserve.