Maiden Priest : Anaal Nathrakh – In The Constellation of The Black Widow

Anaal Nathrakh will have the honor of being the heaviest and most brutal band that got an article written on this site, it's not because there aren't any thing heavier out there, there are bands like Portal, Dodecahedron and Imperial Triumphant that keeps on questioning our notions of what is considered as heavy. What separates Anaal Nathrakh from the countless others is that they have hooks, they have the minimum amount melody in their songs that makes even the most jaded of extreme metal skeptics coming back for more. I was one of them, a skeptic who considered their music to be just white noise recorded as loud as possible, I was wrong, making mistakes and having a prejudice is one of the banes of being a mortal. Here I am making amends, allow me to wax lyrical about one of my favorite bands of all time.

Back in 1998 two Englishmen had an idea of forming a black metal band, a band named after some chant from the film called "Excalibur", there is nothing novel about being just a black metal band in the late 1990s so they fused everything from grindcore to death metal to industrial music to add to their black metal core. The two men called themselves V.I.T.R.I.O.L (Dave Hunt) and Irrumator (Mike Kenney), the former handling vocals and lyrics and the later handling all instruments including drum programming. In the context of their music "vocals" is a loose term, Dave does every thing that is humanly possible with vocal chords and his vox stood the test of time over twenty years is itself an achievement. They are also notorious for not publishing their lyrics, which adds both to their mystery and the misery of fans trying to figure out what they are trying to say.

Why do we listen to heavy metal ? one answer it's for the guitar riffs, the almighty riff that bestows a song to become a classic, everything else that adds to the platter are just secondary, from the opening doom dirge of the title track to the abrupt stop of Blood Eagles Carved on the Backs of Innocents this album has chock-full of them. There is no such thing as 'the quintessential Anaal Nathrakh riff' their riffs are inspired from black metal, melodic death metal and metalcore but the sheer quality of the riffs makes up for their lack of originality in riff ideas.

The song So Be It has the best melodic death metal riff ever written, at around one minute thirty second into the song and that riff comes after an equally good black metal tremolo riff over blast beats. None of these riffs lasts more than twenty seconds at a time, giving it just enough time to settle into you and just when you get used to it another takes over and the best example of this is the album highlight More of Fire Than Blood. The song is probably the best they have ever recorded, it opens with a catchy and infectious riff, almost triumphant in feel but this is Anaal Nathrakh and Dave lets you know it's them, after Mike's short Slayerish solo he comes all over you with hellish screams followed by low vocal gurgle. On the pre-chorus you will hear the first describable vocals of the song and when you think things can't go anymore insane he sings the same lines in the chorus, his clean vocals sound a lot like Ihsahn on his Emperor albums but with much more refinement and menace. It takes 65 seconds to reach till the end of the first chorus and during that time Mike lays down four legitimately sick riff.

The superbly titled The Unbearable Filth of the Soul features core riffs and just before anyone think about labeling the song metalcore the song breaks down in the middle to a black metal assault and it even features pig sequels. Keeping up with the time this album was released the band teach kids how to do a breakdown properly in the song The Lucifer Effect, they also have an ear for epic melodies as heard towards the end of the song Satanarchrist. Oil Upon the Sores of Lepers is made for the mosh pits featuring an anthemic screamed chorus with an equally uplifting rifs underneath.

The lyrics from what that can be understood seems to be well researched, it is not the run of the mill anti-religious blasphemy associated with the genre. The song The Lucifer Effect is about the work of Philip Zimbardo an American psychologist who led the Stanford prison experiment in the year 1971 and wrote the book "The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil", documenting the events surrounding the study. Blood Eagles Carved on the Backs of Innocents is about the "Blood Eagle", a ritualized execution method found in Norse litrature. They even go Latin for the song So Be It, the Latin verses draws some parts of Isaiah 24 from the Bible wherein the Lord considers destroying the earth and all of its inhabitants as they have become sinful. Even the album's title is taken from the work "Moment of Freedom" by Norwegian writer Jens Bjørneboe.

Mick Kenney aka Irrumator

Dave Hunt is a strong contender for the 'best extreme metal vocalist' title but for all his vocal acrobatics this album is Mike Kenney's child, there is not a second here that doesn't feel inspired every riff, every lick and every drum fill feels right at home. If I had to pick one flaw that would be the production, the album is loud and brickwalled to the teeth, every ounce of dynamics gets sucked up buy the master. This is one of those rare cases where my love of the album's contents overrules my hate towards the questionable production choices, but having said (written) that I cannot imagine the album sounding any other way.

Anaal Nathrakh is prolific in their musical output, they went on to make four more albums after this 2009 opus and they have a discography to be proud of, none of their albums are bad. Their latest in 2016, The Whole of the Law even came dangerously close to top this one, that was the album where Dave Hunt amped up his insanity to a whole new level and Mike experimented with symphonic arrangements. They have a new album coming up on September 28th titled A New Kind of Horror and considering the quality of their recent output the album is going to be a killer, the grenade that is going to topple everyones year end 'best of 2018' lists.