It sure doesn’t feel like autumn is even close to beginning where I’m at, so for this edition of Receiving the Evcharist we’re traveling north of the border to find cooler temperatures and check out some Québécois black metal and beer. Drink from the cup of heresy with Boréalys’ L’héritage and Unibroue’s Maudite.

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The Tunes: Boréalys — L’héritage

Hailing from the Abitibi region of western Québec, L’héritage (“The Legacy”) is the first full-length from Boréalys — clearly the duo caught the ear of the great Northern Silence Productions after a debut EP in 2020. This album is a highly melancholic form of atmospheric black metal, sounding like a less-blasty version of Vemod’s Venter på stormene to my ears. Multilayered guitars, choral synths, occasional clean vocals, and the sparing use of blast beats and acoustic guitar is the name of the game here. The drumming is quite simple throughout, but this gives the rest of the instrumentation plenty of room to breathe (in particular the overhead guitar melodies). The production is also to thank for this as it’s totally on point; as raw as this brand of black metal should be, but clear enough to showcase all the different elements present. Forgoing the “soft section followed by a drastic change to blast beats” you might get in a lot of modern atmoblack, this album is much more subdued. Being consistently mid-tempo and centered around five tracks near or past the ten-minute mark there’s a certain degree of patience required, but it’s easy to lose yourself in the atmosphere presented here. The band describes the album as dealing the abuses perpetuated by the church in Abiti; being entirely in French I can’t give specifics, but with translated titles like “To the Orphanage” and “The Cemetery of the Forgotten” I’ll venture a guess that the horrific residential school system is involved to one degree or another. Boréalys aren’t breaking any boundaries with L’héritage, but if you’re searching for some mournful, historically-focused black metal then you won’t be disappointed.

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The Booze: Unibroue — Maudite

Located in the Montreal suburb of Chambley, Unibroue appears to be one of the larger breweries in Québec; being bought out by Sapporo in 2006 is likely a major factor in being able to get ahold of their beer across the continent at my local World Market (imported from Québec, shipped from New York). Maudite (“damned”) is a fairly dark, roasty, malty red-amber ale evoking the legend La Chasse-galerie, a local variation of the Wild Hunt. It’s got lots of flavor at first taste — bread, caramel, hints of orange — but they fade fairly quickly. I had put this in the fridge, but the flavors don’t reveal themselves until it’s closer to room temperature. At 8% ABV you might expect this to be a stronger beer, but it goes down very easily. Imbibing this out of a 750mL bottle, the only limiting factor to enjoying this is the size of my stomach. The lack of lasting flavor prevents it from being a truly great beer, but it sure has me looking forward to colder months and the darker beers suited for that time of year.

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Cheers, and be good to each other

— Colin