The sister album to “Helionomicon”, which is being released at the same time, this one promises a hybrid of technical death and black metal.
Sure enough what we have is a whirlwind of furious, technically-oriented shapes. Roaring, echoing vocals supplement the uncompromising wall of sound, and technical, bordering on distorted guitar patterns. This initial introduction to Hell’s kitchen is “Cephalophore”. “Fractional Fortresses” is a ramped up and destructive riposte. At the heart of all this is the uncompromising hostility. No prisoners are taken. It’s obscure and riotously heavy. Track endings serve little purpose other than to shock us with the silence as this band doesn’t know the meaning of quiet build-up. It’s one violent attack after another. But it’s still interesting by virtue of the technical guitar work and the constantly crashing destruction. It’s as if a big storm has landed in town. After working through the rather uniform technical death romp of “Flesh Propulsion”, I hope for some variety but “Astranumeral Astral Chants” goes off in the same direction – plenty of venom and thunder and death metal chaos and destruction, so I suppose that’s something but it’s relentless rather than imaginative.
The patterns and aggression are so strong that I couldn’t get meaning out of the constant firepower and roaring vocals. There’s plenty of technical content to inject interest but I’m guessing you wouldn’t be so interested in technicality when you’re standing in a battlefield in the middle of all the crossfire as here. One thing this album cannot be accused of lacking is intensity. Or extremity. “Larynx Plateau” covers both these bases but then so does all of it. Explosion follows explosion. Sometimes the tempo steps up, and it adds interest value when it does. Always it’s a representation of a ghastly world. So it was no surprise that “Cultus Quadrivium” follows the same angry pattern, anarchically deathing and rolling in its extreme way until an unexpected cosmic section intervenes. After listening to all this, all I could picture was metal shards and violent assaults so it was somewhat incongruous to hear dreamy cosmic sounds. This does give way to a sinister soundscape, suggestive of the scary underworld which sums up we’ve been over the course of this album.
This is the musical equivalent of taking part in a heavyweight boxing context. Extreme death metal sets the ugly tone, and has a lot to commend it, but at the same time “Anthronomicon” drowns itself in that extremity. I’m fine with that to a point, but in spite of the intensity and technical interest, I found it an album that has to be endured rather than enjoyed.
(6/10 Andrew Doherty)
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