Style: Industrial black metal with grind influences
Primary Emotions/Themes: Completely unhinged violence
Thoughts: I've been with Anaal Nathrakh from the very beginning. The Codex Necro was more intense than just about anything I had ever heard at that point. The combination of black metal played with the intensity of grindcore was enough to blow my young mind.
That was over twenty years ago now, and my tolerance for extreme music is much greater now than it ever was in the past. I've heard things now that make Anaal Nathrakh sound tame in comparison. They are still a quality band, but it's not the insane uppercut to all my senses at once like it was when I first heard them.
The albums leading up to Vanitas were of varying quality. Eschaton was excellent, as was Constellation. Passion and Hell is Empty were lacking though, especially Passion failed to grasp my attention in the slightest. It was a significant step back for the band.
I'm happy to say that Vanitas is a return to quality for the band. At this point there really isn't much new for the band to cover. They have a formula and don't really deviate from it much if at all. Does that make for a bad record? Hardly. It's simply not as innovative as some of the earlier stuff was.
Anaal Nathrackh play an intense form of black metal. It's violent, its uncompromising and it's got some of the best vocal work this side of the river styx. The riffs often have that "black metal played at death metal intensity" feel to them. Almost always they are accompanied by a blast beat going 666 bpm. Nothing here is subtle, everything is played at 11 and the intensity of the music matches.
The vocals are the real star here though. They are all over the place. Sometimes they will be a gurgling growl, next it'll be a throat shredding scream, the next it'll move straight into an operatic clean vocal chorus. Vitriol (appropriate name if I've ever heard one) never lets up and adds that spicy "it" factor to the music to move it beyond it's peers.
My favorite moment of this is Foraging Towards the Sunset. The verses on this song are a garbled mess of different vocal styles that result in something akin to a tar pit mixed with lava burping out vocals. It's spastic and one of the finest moments in extreme metal for a vocal performance. The chorus has a soaring vocal line that is opposite in execution as you can get from the verse. The cleans uses here come from deep down and are filled with such passion and conviction I usually have to be sitting down when they come on. The song finishes up with a nearly thirty second scream as all instruments stop... just one last testament to why this guy is elite.
Vanitas isn't anything new or different from Anaal Nathrakh. Rather it's a refinement of everything that they have perfected to this point. In a lot of ways they write the same album over and over again these days - with varying degrees of success. Vanitas happens to be the best rendition of said album.
Written May 1st 2024
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