I've been eating a lot of tinned fish recently. I started with tuna, then salmon (the best), and recently I tried some sardines with preserved lemon. I've really been enjoying myself on this fish journey, and I'm having a similar journey with Alice Simard's metal projects, this here being my fourth. I started with Luminesce, then Vitrified Entity, then Onchocerciasis Esophagogastroduodenoscopy, and now coffret di bijoux. This project is Simard's attempt at fusing blackgaze with progressive metal, a combination I can't pass up on. Yes, I did just compare her music to tinned fish. Whoops.

"lose myself in you" is a two-song record, both reaching at least fifteen minutes ("lose myself in you," the first track, is 14:59, so close enough). It's clad in the anime-ish art that most of Simard's work seems to be in, and somehow, I felt that the array of colors on a white backdrop is warning me about incoming heavy shit. I was right. While there's a ton of blackgaze, Simard gets very gritty with the guitars, chugging away progressively and making sure that no two tracks are 100% blackgaze. Waves upon waves of heavy distortion are piled thick, but you can still hear her high-pitched wails. The perpetual drums during these blackgaze segments are pivotal to creating such an atmosphere, and the bass is audible in most of these instances, too. This is a solo project, mind you. The progressiveness waits until later in the tracks. At around nine-and-a-half minutes in the first song, the attitude turns from "basking in our sadness" to "let's kick some fucking ass," and Simard goes full-blown proghead. I've never heard blackgaze get so groovy and technical before. As an electronic element, synth riffs occasionally chime in.

"lose myself in you" is also lyrically heavy. There aren't a lot of them, but in such few lines, Simard pulls at the heartstrings. Whether they're screamed or vocoded, you can sense the raw emotion behind them. The vocoded lines sadly cheapened them a little, and I'm thankful they were sparingly used. It's an emotional record otherwise. A good chunk of "under fog" is a lovely flex of Simard's piano skills, which in turn provides a delicate ending to the album. Blackgaze is a moody genre, and coffret de bijoux exemplifies such.

coffret de bijoux (jewelry box in French) is the best project of Alice Simard I've yet heard. Better than her technical death metal, better than her neoclassical metal, better than her goregrind. I'm glad I'm still paying attention to her projects, because you really never know what you're going to find.