But there I was in record stores in Paris, because I was in Paris and there are record stores there. And I might as well listen to whatever they have on listening stations. Especially the ones that Belle heard first and thought I might like. I think she picked out three, one of them with reservations, and I agreed with her about all three, including the reservations, which left me with two. Weeks after returning, I'm still listening to both records and still haven't bothered finding out a single additional fact about either band, which is both a good reflection on her judgment and offers some hope that the potential obsession has been successfully contained.

On the cover, Kyo look like a fairly painfully generic four-piece, like Deep Blue Something fancying themselves Alice in Chains. The credits reveal that they do only some of their own programming and use a session bassist, which doesn't suggest much grunge authenticity. According to Babelfish, their first album was good enough to "install them on the scene of the pop Frenchwoman", which sounds like it might be more fun for them than for the Frenchwoman, or me. Le Chemin appears to be their second album. "Le Chemin" means "The Way".

Kyo do, however, turn out to have a way. It involves, for the most part, lots of big guitars, layers of carefully groomed sample textures, crashing toy-industrial rhythms, Benoit Poher's plaintive voice, and production values impeccable enough to recontextualize their facial hair. In action, they sound more like Deep Blue Something channeling Depeche Mode via Marilyn Manson, or the Goo Goo Dolls after a week of cursory Sisters of Mercy lessons. This goth-lite combination hasn't been much in fashion in the US in a while, and I have no idea whether it's any more popular in France.

But it makes me pretty happy. "Le Chemin" shoots muttery static-drums and florid synth-piano glissades through Michael Penn-esque quasi-cello whirs, and Poher duets airily with Dutch singer Sita. Poher picks his way diffidently through the clipped semi-rap verses of "Je Cours", but the choruses revert to comfortably sweeping power-chord bluster. "Dernière Danse" turns wistful, à la the Verve Pipe or maybe K's Choice, and disassembles and reassembles gracefully. "Tout Envoyer en l'Air" fires up the buzzsaw guitars and stutter-slam drum cadences, and reminds me pleasantly of a more gadgety Idlewild or a bubblier Kent. "Chaque Seconde" lists towards power-ballad, sighing into dreamy falsetto in the choruses, but the lurching "Comment Te Dire" returns to overdriven guitar crunch. "Je Saigne Encore" is a measured lullaby on the order of a re-energized Travis, but "Je Te Vends Mon åme" grumbles and gnashes under its beat-box loops, and "Pardonné" poses boy-band strut over quietly pinging guitars. The faintly early-Stereophonics-ish "Sur Nos Lèvres" is either the album's least mannered song or its most, depending on whether you key more on the relative absence of production tricks from the wiry guitar lines or the pervasive effeteness of the lead vocal and the syrupy glow of the harmonies. "Tout Reste à Faire", the finale, tries to edge into sultry twang, which isn't my idea of Kyo's strength and makes for a less cathartic conclusion than the album seemed otherwise to be headed towards, but downbeat endings are the product of the same twinges of pretension as the Photoshopped flood water on the cover and the haircuts. And despite the damage it reliably incurs, I basically prefer pretension to its absence. Better to be something than to want to be something, if you have the chance, but if you don't want, how will you tell what's a chance and what isn't?

Paradize is long enough for two albums, and kind of half-restarts in the middle with the extravagantly over-orchestrated "Le Grand Secret". Melissa Auf Der Maur contributes a guest vocal, and the song builds from tolling electric piano into synth-string surges and eventually fuzzed guitar spasms before settling into a circumspect decrescendo and heartbeat fade-out. "La Nuit des Fées" clashes keyboard bleats seemingly swiped from Foreigner's "Cold as Ice" against booming drums and washes of indistinct guitar. "Marilyn" sounds like an Icehouse meditation bursting into clattering Sigue Sigue Sputnik reel. "Le Manoir" casts back to New Order and Gardening by Moonlight. "Popstitute" is a fabulously stupid title, and lives up to it with a song like Love and Rockets trying to play a Portuguese square-dance. "Dark" is painted bleak, like "Love Will Tear Us Apart" revised to "Love Will Make Us Wear Too Much Eyeliner". "Comateen 1" reprises just about every allusion made elsewhere, before finishing off with a shameless "O Superman" vocoder verse. And after all this, I'm actually pretty surprised that Indochine don't have the slightest idea how to end an album in character either. "Un Signe en Hiver" is a Jean Louis Murat cover, rendered creakily as bad piano over bad drum-machine sputter, like Casio-preset piano-bar chanson. Sometimes you can learn something about yourself by putting on somebody else's costume, even when there's less to it than your own. But that isn't necessarily an excuse for leaving the house half-dressed.

Forgetting is good. VULGAR is easily the most bracing thing I've heard in a year when "bracing" hasn't often been the chief virtue of music I've liked. The first song spots you a placidly ominous fifteen seconds before Kyo lets out his first grotesque bellow. After that serenity has no place. The drumming is restlessly brutal, as if the band holds a permanent grudge against anybody who ever tried to stand still for a minute at a time, and the band's own appallingly overbearing production manages to keep the beats heavily distinct at a speed where many death-metal bands would be content to let them rot into lumpy sludge. Guitarists Die and Kaoru seem blissfully aware that there are parts of the world where Fugazi and Don Caballero are considered to play a qualitatively different sort of music from Slayer and Dream Theater, and from Nine Inch Nails and Killing Joke (never mind the internal distinctions), and are thus about equally apt to grind into geometric dissonance, surging half-step hooks, or the kind of noise you might get out of Steve Vai by dragging him behind an old black Firebird. Toshiya's bass isn't captured with quite the timbral detail Peter Collins lavished on Eddie Jackson on Queensrÿche's Empire, but it's muscular enough to make a lot of nominally stationary objects in my house vibrate. And Kyo, the singer, has one of those halfway shrill Japanese voices that sound like he's perpetually singing out of the middle of a yawn voluminous enough to swallow a wolverine, except when he sounds like he's in the process of swallowing the wolverine, and the wolverine isn't enjoying the experience. The combined effect is something like old Thought Industry crossed with Poison, or possibly Killing Joke hijacked by Hypocrisy, and the fact that Kyo is mostly singing in Japanese adds an extra crazed-rant dimension for Japanese-ignorant audiences, which at least in real-time still includes me. (And a brief inspection of the written lyrics of "Marmalade Chainsaw", as a randomly selected track, suggests that translation isn't really going to make much difference.) I'm grimly certain that most listeners perplexed by other extreme musics like death metal and industrial noise are going to find this no more accommodating, and probably the fans of most current Western extremes will balk at the preening theatricality. We don't combine manic violence and ebullient fun this way, at the moment. We have Marilyn Manson and Matrix sequels, and wonder why cool seems so dull.

HIM, on the other hand (or HER, as they seem doomed to be known in the US in deference to June of 44 drummer Doug Scharin's side-project HiM), are much more subtly seditious. "Love Metal" is what they call their own little mini-genre, and their talisman, the heartagram, is a circled pentagram in which the top two points have been rounded off to turn it into a triangle-crossed heart. Valo, the singer, wears enough make-up to get attention, but not enough to turn it into a costume, and the combination of his satyric presence and the shaggy, Megadeth-like demeanor of the rest of the band isn't as easy to reduce to social homily. Loving HIM isn't just buying a prefab declaration of your uniqueness, it risks endorsing some odd agenda of their own, and I don't think that will work here. Where Manson is asexual, Valo is a romantic, and although his material mostly deals with love in the abstract, this makes it potentially effeminate by omission, and whatever can be claimed for the current state of ambiguous-sexual-preference tolerance in the American Empire on the basis of discrimination laws and the popularity of Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, you'll notice that there are still no homosexuals in male team sports, and only one gay man in heavy metal.

But maybe I'm underestimating people. Maybe we're farther along in music than we are in sports (or maybe one offhand "girl" reference per album is actually enough). Or maybe, more mundanely, if HIM can't make it here it's only because the idea of Andrew Eldritch falling in love and making a happy Sisters of Mercy record, which is pretty much what HIM sounds like, doesn't please other people as much as it pleases me. But other people suck, we knew that, and Love Metal might well be my favorite goth-metal album since Vision Thing. "Buried Alive by Love" rattles along on guitar-buzz verses before soaring into wistful "If I should die before I wake" / "If I should wake before I die" crooning. "Funeral of Hearts" is alternately lacy and crushing. "Beyond Redemption" recalls "Rainbow in the Dark" and maybe Night Ranger before that. "Sweet Pandemonium" fills in the next step in the unlikely series from "Iron Man" to "This Corrosion" to "November Rain". "Soul on Fire" brandishes its Ministry/NIN/Manson lineage in hammering choruses, and "The Sacrament" could be HIM's version of Evanescence's gauzy shimmer through blacklit fog, but "This Fortress of Tears" knows its old Black Sabbath and new Tori Amos better. "Circle of Fear" sounds more than a little like an Eldritch setting for Chris Isaak (presumably not a coincidence, given HIM's notorious cover of "Wicked Game"). "Endless Dark" flutters warmly under all its guitar bombast. And HIM do know how to end an album: a grand eight-minute 3/4 power-metal ballad-waltz swooping from glassy Rhodes hush to the kind of redemptively heartbroken chorus you can only sing properly if you're making distractedly swaying orchestra-conductor hand-motions, preferably while wearing a shirt with frilly cuffs. "I walk through the gardens of dying light", Valo sighs, "and cross all the rivers deep and dark as the night". This used to be heavy metal's country. The heartagram may be a preposterous symbol, but unlike the thoroughly co-opted iconography from which it was cheerfully derived, it's also a real symbol, a mark of human haunting and a banner of hearts instead of fists. We need more banners. I know this pageantry is ludicrous, of course, but I also know that the difference between majesty and absurdity is in how you listen. And so I listen in the constant intractable hope that this majestic music, willing to be transfixed by its own indefensible faiths, is what we're really afraid to admit we believe.