Written By Kevin McSweeney
London Sessions EP Review
French dark progressive rock stalwarts The Old Dead Tree are a band I have never really engaged with before, despite them having been around since the fading embers of the 20th Century.
This is to my immense shame, especially as someone with a fondness for the darkness, and I don’t mean the band from Lowestoft with the catsuits and the falsetto vocals.
This EP, as the title might suggest, was recorded in London, at the world-famous Abbey Road Studio, as made famous by the Beatles album of the same name.
The fabulous cover art makes reference to this, with a tree, presumably old and dead, smack-bang in the middle of the iconic zebra crossing from the cover of the 1969 LP.
The four songs were recorded during the time that the Parisians were working on Second Thoughts, their fourth full-length album, and first for seventeen years, which was released in 2024 via the estimable Season of Mist label.
Here, we go through the tracks one by one, as is our wont, in order to subject them to root-and-branch analysis. I’ll get my coat.
London Sessions EP Review
Feel Alive Again
The opening track is somewhat ironically titled, given the name of the band. There’s a jarring deployment of the word “longer” in the opening lines, but I don’t mean to be critical, as their English is far better than my French.
The vocals take the form of a heartfelt and tender tenor croon, occasionally augmented by dulcet harmonies. It gets a little heavier towards the end with the introduction of an insistent staccato riff, but the majority of the song reminds me of The Rasmus more than anything else, if anyone remembers them.
Time Has Come
Plinky-plonky keys and a pulsing beat back up the aforementioned tenor croon of Manuel Menoz on the intro here, before it opens into relatively fast-paced rock with a riff reminiscent of Placebo at their most punky.
The verses are subdued and listless, the pre-choruses grand and emphatic before opening into the fast riff again. There is an emotional weight to this song that makes it compelling as it culminates again in a heavier tone.
By The Way
This is a rerecording of the song originally on their 2005 album The Perpetual Motion. It fits seamlessly with their more recent compositions stylistically.
The opening verse is languid and gentle. The chorus introduces sustained power chords to proceedings but never ups the ante to the point where we venture into metal territory.
This is sombre, melodic, intelligent and refined rock music. Actually, the middle eight, with its spoken word performance and dramatic embellishments, reminds me of Faith No More at their most restrained.
I’m thinking Album of The Year rather than Angel Dust, Ashes to Ashesbeing the song in particular that comes to mind.
What Else Could We’ve Said
This is also a rerecording of the song from The Perpetual Motion. The title bears an unorthodox deployment of an apostrophe, but I refer you to what I said earlier about their English being much better than my French.
Clean guitar arpeggios bring us into this track, with Munoz’s vocals at their most impassioned. When the heavier guitars come in, it’s almost like System of a Down on a song like Spiders, minus the vocal histrionics of Serj Tankien.
This is the longest song on the EP at five minutes and thirty-nine seconds, which makes me question their prog credentials. We do get a bit of double-kick drumming towards the end, which is as metal as this EP gets. (We are Metal Lair. We’re always looking for the metal!)
I guess what I’m not getting is what defines them as progressive rock or metal. These are all conventional songs of conventional length with conventional time signatures.
They are perfectly capable musicians for sure, but there are no Dream Theater-style ostentatious displays of virtuosity. They’re not very prog for a prog band.
I get the dark, brooding elements of their sound far more. These songs are characterised by a pervading melancholy, a quintessentially French sense of ennui.
I could well imagine them in black and white, sullenly smoking cigarettes on a balcony overlooking the Seine. Having said that, I can’t help thinking that dark, gloomy, atmospheric music – the kind that some might term “gothic” – works best with booming bass-baritone vocals, rather than a gentle tenor voice.
You can blame that on a youth spent listening to the likes of Moonspell, HIM and Type O Negative. In summary, it’s not to my taste, but that doesn’t detract from the fact that this is a collection of four well-written and skilfully performed songs that will be highly appealing to others.
It’s not that it’s melodic. I’m comfortable with that. It’s more that it’s too polished, too slick, too palatable for a mainstream audience to appeal to me.
It’s not what you’d expect from a band billed as being for fans of the likes of Paradise Lost and My Dying Bride, unless you’re thinking of the former’s abandonment of metal in the late 1990s in favour of a Depeche Mode-style dark synth sound: my least favourite era of their career. I really do love the cover art, though.
Metal Lair awards The London Sessions EP by The Old Dead Tree three and a half Devil Horns.
London Sessions is out now on all digital platforms. Order Here.
Tracklist:
1. Feel Alive Again (03:43)
2. Time Has Come (03:49)
3. By The Way (London Sessions 2025) (04:29)
4. What Else Could We’ve Said (London Sessions 2025) (05:39)
Full runtime: 18:42
Line-up:
Manuel Munoz — Vocals
Nicolas Chevrollier — Guitars & Backing Vocals
Nicolas Cornolo — Guitars
Gilles Moinet — Bass Guitar
Raphaël Antheaume — Drums
Recording Studio:
Abbey Road Studios, London, United Kingdom.
Production Credits:
Produced, engineered & mixed by François-Maxime Boutault (Behomth, Dagoba) at Les Liens du Son.
Mastered by Tony Lindgren (Opeth, Paradise Lost) at Fascination Street Studios.
Guest Musician:
Raphaël Verguin (Psygnosis) — Cello
Cover Art:
Henri Lejeune (exclamations.fr)
Photography:
Band & studio photos taken by Julien Metternich.
THE OLD DEAD TREE ONLINE:
