Anathema - Falling Deeper

Some bands reinvent themselves. Some stay the same. Some produce the odd concept album or try something totally other once in a while. But surely the masters of reinvention have to be Anathema. With their latest foray into the wildly unexpected they have produced Falling Deeper; an orchestral, almost neo-classical, reworking of some of their older doom songs.

Ostensibly a follow-up to Hindsight, which saw rearrangements of various Anathema songs, Falling Deeper takes the whole concept to a far reaching conclusion. It may be a step too far for some. Most of the songs are unrecognisable from their heavy, guitar driven origins.

The whole project got started by Danny Cavanagh who was playing with piano arrangements, and who then was inspired to include a 26 piece orchestra. For lovers of modern classical pieces, film scores and related orchestral noodling, this album is sure to tick every box.

As a relatively recent convert to Anathema fandom (A Natural Disaster being the first album I heard) I was unaware of, or at least not entirely familiar with, many of the original tracks. I've since gone through a sort of Anathemic nostalgia, listening to the new and the old together. I can safely say that Falling Deeper is a work on its own, and not a remix or reissue of older material.

The music itself, then, is a very relaxing, emotionally charged experience. Crescendo follows lull follows crescendo as the music builds and falls for the relatively short 38 minute run time. While it's easy to zone out and experience it washing over you, the melodies that made the original tracks so great still draws you in, intertwined with the soaring strings and the soft, yet powerful vocals.

Of all the tracks reworked for this album, it's hard to pick particular highlights. Crestfallen and Sleep In Sanity start proceedings as they mean to go on. Everwake's dreamlike soundscape and beautiful vocal is a real pleasure, and Sunset Of Age completes the album with exhilarating, yet somewhat disquieting, aplomb.

It's been rumoured that Anathema is in the studio recording all new material for release early next year. If and when they tour the new material, I can't help but hope they bring the orchestra along so I can experience Falling Deeper in the best way to experience any Anathema track; live, up close and heart wrenchingly personal.

Pain Of Salvation - Road Salt Two

I wrote about Pain Of Salvations last album, Road Salt One, quite some time ago now. I talked about the raw emotion, the excellent songwriting, and the fantastic production. It's still one of my favourite albums. And now I there is a sequel, the unsurprisingly titled Road Salt Two.

This is the second half of the Road Salt concept, a pair of albums exploring life, emotion, and human interaction. In many ways, it's more of the same. I could wax lyrical about it in much the same way as Road Salt One because, in truth, it is very, very similar. It's almost a second disk to accompany the first. And this is no bad thing.

The same basic structure is used again, with the recurring theme of "the road" cropping up time and again. But the lyrical themes take a turn here. They are more mature, they are the end of the journey, whereas Road Salt One told of the beginning. The walker isn't walking the road any more. He's sitting, exhausted, and remembering everything that has gone before.

There is a peculiar quality to the production that makes the album feel a lot older than it is. Subtle use of distortion imbues in the listener a sense of nostalgia. The beautifully short, yet poignant, 1979 really pins that nostalgia down. Where Road Salt One was about struggling through life, Road Salt Two is about breaking point. About looking back at what is gone, and facing what has to come.

Some familiar aspects of Road Salt One come back for a second outing. The grizzled blues rock of the walker is back in Of Salt, and the cacophonous, deeply disturbing carnival sound of Wait, Darling, Wait returns in Break, Darling, Break. A suitably painful reworking of the familiar sound.

While the album should be taken as a whole, and all the tracks are superb, there are a number that stand out. The aforementioned 1979 is one, the somewhat disquieting Eleven, and To The Shoreline, which is Road Salt Two's answer to Sisters. The Deeper Cut, Through The Distance and Healing Now are also brilliant songs in their own right.

I'm sure some would be disappointed in the apparent lack of progress since Road Salt One. I'm not. Road Salt Two is exactly what I wanted it to be; a completion of Road Salt One. Not diverging too far to be a different concept, but not similar enough to be the same album all over again. This is the end of the road, and it has been both a pleasure and a heartache to walk it.

Mastodon - The Hunter

There has been a lot of buzz around The Hunter, the latest album from American sludge metal band Mastodon, from a variety of intriguingly different sources. The usual metal media has, of course, been posting the latest news and views, but it's also been heavily talked about in prog rock circles. It's been billed as the "other" prog album of the year, alongside Opeth's Heritage.

If The Hunter is prog, it's a very different kind of prog to Heritage indeed. The songs clock in between 2:36 for the wonderfully titled Blasteroid and 5:31 for The Sparrow. None of your usual 15 minute, multi-part prog noodling here.

In truth, while previous Mastodon albums have been conceptual masterpieces, painting a huge canvas across the whole album, The Hunter feels more like a collection of singles. And yet, at the same time, it doesn't. While the songs are distinct and stand alone, they also work together. There is a definite common theme of "wood" running through the album, from the obvious forestry in Curl of the Burl to the wooden figurehead on the cover.

The songs veer wildly from style to style, from the psychedelic twiddling of Stargasm, the heavy metal of Spectrelight, the straight up pop/rock of Curl of the Burl and the melodic, emotional strains of the title track. The sound is dense and consuming, with great drum work underpinning the guitar riffs and multitude of vocal styles.

The vocals have caused some controversy in the press for the use of autotune, amongst other effects. To be honest, if I hadn't been told, I wouldn't have known, so it's not like the obnoxious roboto-vocals so popular in the pop world right now. The band all seem to have a crack at it, with vocal harmonies coming in to play.

Having bought the special edition version, there are some extra goodies. A full set of music videos that can be watched in track order to provide a great immersive experience, and a somewhat gimmicky "augmented reality" bit. With the use of a webcam, you can replace your head with the … um … creature from the album cover art. I haven't tried it yet.

There is a great variety on this album, and it's both easy to listen to as background, catchy enough to get your attention, as well as providing a wonderful experience if you want to get caught up in the music. I think the fact that in little over a week I have racked up 125 scrobbles says it all.

Nostalgia of an Opeth nature

After the last rather lacklustre post about Heritage, it got me hankering for when Opeth did really awesome songs with only clean vocals. Here is my favourite. Harvest, from Blackwater Park. Worlds apart, really.

Opeth - Heritage

There has been a not inconsiderable stir in the metal community over the latest Opeth record. After months of discussions, interviews and previews, Mikael Åkerfeldt's newest vision is with us and causing all manner of confusion. We all know by now that it's not metal, but what is it?

It's not an easy question to answer. Many records will draw the listener in, play them a story or an emotion, stir something inside them. Not so Heritage. It won't pull you in, it won't tell you how to feel about it. It's a very difficult record to listen to properly, because it requires significant effort on the part of the listener.

The first vocal track, The Devil's Orchard, has been around a while now. I didn't know what to make of it when it first appeared, and I still don't know now. It's a sort of prog/jazz fusion that doesn't really sound like anything in particular.

The rest of the album contains a varied mix of material. The heavier prog rock style of Slither is countered by the peaceful and mostly instrumental Nepenthe. Häxprogress has some interesting riffs if you listen hard enough for them, but is otherwise unremarkable.

I'm not sure if the difficulties I have found with this record are due to a fundamental flaw in the record itself, or my own mental disconnect between what's going into my ears and what I know is Opeth. I can't help but think that if this was Anathema, undisputed (in my mind, anyway) kings of atmospheric rock, they would have made a far more immersive production out of the same basic musical style.

As it stands, Heritage has turned out not to be a particularly engaging experience. I almost hesitate to use the phrase "easy listening", not because some of the softer riffs and repeated rythmn aren't deserving of it, but because it's not an easy listen. I've read a couple of reviews before writing my own, and one phrase that seems to crop up is that the album "makes people think." I don't feel that it really does. The lyrics are not particularly groundbreaking. They're just presented in a jerky, inconsistent way as the songs lurch from riff to disjointed riff. It is not the level of songwriting I have come to expect from the band, and other albums I have bought recently (more on those in future posts) outshine Heritage in every respect.

Sometimes when I first hear a record, especially one that is designed to subvert expectations, I find that it doesn't "click." A few months down the line, I may give it another chance and be pleasantly surprised at how well it's aged. I don't know if that will be the case with Heritage, or if I will just get my prog kicks from elsewhere and leave the crushing-yet-beautiful prog death metal to the likes of Fornost Arnor, whose latest album, Death Of A Rose, is a worthy successor to Opeth's metal history.