ANATHEMA: FALLING DEEPER (2011)
1) Crestfallen; 2) Sleep In
Sanity; 3) Kingdom; 4) They Die; 5) Everwake; 6) J'Ai Fait Une Promesse; 7)
Alone; 8) We The Gods; 9) Sunset Of Age.
Another attempt at re-writing their legacy (as
if somebody really cared), this
relatively short album finally finds Anathema doing exactly the kind of thing
they should have done much earlier: going all the way back to their beginnings
as a doom metal band and reinventing those old black tunes in the vein of their
new neo-symph-prog image. And although Steven Wilson is no longer with them to
lend a helping hand directly, they retain the affiliation with the Kscope
label; also, their new engineer is Andrea Wright, who'd had a long history of
work with everybody from Black Sabbath to Marillion to Clinic to Coldplay, and
could certainly get the job done well on an album that places its entire trust
in atmosphere.
To complete the picture, the band secures the
services of veteran progger Dave Stewart, formerly of Egg, Hatfield & The
North, National Health, and Bruford fame — the man used to play keyboards for
some of the most twisted and adventurous prog bands in the Golden Age, but the
21st century largely sees him as a strings arranger for various neo-prog
outfits, including, of course, Porcupine Tree and Steven Wilson, from whom he
was «passed down» to Anathema. Actually, he'd already worked for them on We're Here, but on that album, the
strings were nowhere near as prominent as they are on these remakes — you might
as well credit the record to «Anathema Feat. Dave Stewart», or you might even
reverse that order.
The result... well, the result could have been
great if the songs we are talking about were great songs in the first place,
but they weren't, so it couldn't. Atmospheric background remains atmospheric
background, no matter whether you are constructing it with heavy metal guitars
or pianos and strings, and I cannot say that, having been transferred to a new
medium, they managed to uncover previously concealed plains of spirituality or
valleys of bliss. (For the record, only a few of the tunes come from LPs like Serenades or The Silent Enigma; most are taken over from even more obscure early
EPs that I have not talked about or even heard, so it is perfectly possible
that some of the songs began life as
embarrassing trash heaps, before they were all recast in this single mold. I
doubt it, though).
It's not as if these are lazy recreations or
anything: no, the songs are completely reworked, and the new arrangements are
often more complex and sprawling than they used to be — ʽJ'Ai Fait Une
Promesseʼ, for instance, which used to be a brief non-metal acoustic interlude,
is stripped of its original vocal (by one of the band's lady friends called
Ruth) and recast as a pseudo-baroque chamber orchestra performance; and ʽAloneʼ
from The Silent Enigma gains at
least a couple extra levels of sonic depth, even if you only consider the
resplendent, deeply resonant production on the acoustic guitar sound alone —
not to mention all the rich overlays. Next to these recreations, the originals
sound like pale sketches, and then, on top of the cake, you get the heavenly
vocals of Anneke van Giersbergen (fresh out of The Gathering and ready to grace
some former fellow competitors with her cordial presence) on two of the tracks.
This should all be very rich and rewarding,
yet, as it happens with Anathema so much more often than I'd like to, it still
ends up plain and «pretty» from a textbookish point of view, enough to make for
some tasteful background muzak, but never memorable in the least, since
everything flows so smoothly. The only track where I am ready to accept that
they did a stellar job is the album closer, ʽSunset Of Ageʼ, extracted from its
original metal sheen and recast as a slightly Eastern-influenced mix of
turbulent strings and wildly unleashed colorful electric guitars: the coda is a
supercool bit of sturm-und-drang that will at least perform the good deed of
kicking you awake from the slumber in which you have most likely been finding
yourself for the previous half hour. Nothing else even begins to approach this
performance's intensity.
One curious feeling I have noticed is that the
songs have largely been remade in keeping with the band's new-found spirit of
calm, sad optimism — even tracks like ʽCrestfallenʼ, beginning with telling
lyrics such as "I cry a tear of hope but it is lost in helplessness, the
darkness eats away at the very embers of my blah blah blah", use
tonalities and timbres that suggest a streak of light ahead, and the formerly
growling vocals have been replaced by high-pitched «whisper vocals»
(reminiscent of recent post-blackgaze artists like Alcest) that clearly suggest
a change of scenery: used to be Mordor, now it's more like Lothlorien. Problem
is, your everyday routine in Lothlorien is hardly more of an adventure than
said routine in Mordor — you just do your whining and complaining in a more
gallant manner, but who ever said that a melancholic elf is more of a
show-maker by definition than a pissed-off goblin? In a contest of mediocre
songwriting, I'd probably find myself pining for the goblin anyway.
No comments:
Post a Comment