I don’t really know what America is, y’know? A place this big and beautiful and awful and ridiculous, though, I suppose it can’t ever be A Single Thing. (Which, probably, is also what makes it somewhat easy – and dangerous – to appropriate for one’s own parochial lusts.) It’s a riddle with infinite answers, then, or maybe a map with no scale and a constantly spinning compass.
The reason I bring this up is that Anagnorisis, the Louisville, Kentucky-based black metal band whose second full-length album Beyond All Light is the matter at hand, has a slogan printed up on a bunch of its merch:
“Holdin’ On To American Black Metal.”
So, I see a phrase like that, and I don’t really know what it means, but at the same time, it undoubtedly sets off some deep, resonant pulse somewhere. A source code barely salvageable, or a memory long since ceded to the time-wracked shores of Lethe, the river of forgetfulness in Greek mythology. The word “anagnorisis” itself comes from the Greek tragedians, and refers to a dramatic moment when a character finally understands someone’s identity, and thus the true nature of a situation (think of poor Oedipus, for example). It is most often translated as “recognition,” but for our purposes it’s also not too damn linguistically distant from the Greek word for truth: aletheia. That’s a lovely thing, isn’t it? Etymologically, the Greeks conceived of truth not as an abstract element to be possessed. Instead, truth is a process, an active choice. The river of forgetfulness is Lethe, and truth is aletheia. A-letheia. Un-forgetting. Remembering.
Recognizing, even.
Album opener “Eulerian Path,” for example, is so hugely engrossing that it forced its own recognition on me. Namely, that when one listens to a huge amount of music from the perspective of a critic, it becomes second nature to always apply an analytical filter to any new musical experience: “Oh, this sounds like X, and it has these flaws, and it could be better if Y…” On my first several spins through Beyond All Light, though, that didn’t happen. The music, with all its power and roiling emotion, had simply swept me up and shut me down. The chorus to “Eulerian Path” features a beautiful tremolo riff that snakes its way across both typical blasting and half-time heavy metal stomping, which is one of those compositional tricks that lesser bands never quite master. Here, it just flows.
“This Cursed Blood” cuts its early riffs into neatly geometrical segments, and in the process sounds like something Snorre Ruch might have come up with for his early Thorns material. Lead vocalist Zachary Kerr is in fierce form throughout the song, with his overblown howls calling to mind Anaal Nathrakh’s Dave Hunt or Dodheimsgard’s Aldrahn. More importantly, though, the song demonstrates a perfect internal logic. When a bit of saxophone squawks into the picture around the four-minute mark, it actually complements the frantic atmosphere rather than distracting from it, and the song’s conclusion is a masterclass in sustained crescendo and powerful coda. This logical construction applies to the album as a whole, which is clearly written in two halves; the scene-setting and pulse-racing first two tracks lead wonderfully into the sparse tremolo landscape that opens “Death Mimics Life,” which is eventually joined by booming drum kicks and a mountain-straddling sense of grim grandeur.
Stylistically, although Anagnorisis has a full-time keyboard player, the band never quite feels like ‘symphonic black metal’ in the traditional sense. The keyboards and other non-traditional elements (saxophone, violin, samples, and so forth) are used sparingly, and only to supplement the undeniably kinetic elements already in play, rather than to inject a cheap sense of false drama. Second-half centerpiece “Bountiful Godless Life” rips, shreds, and snorts like Emperor for two minutes before withdrawing inward for an acoustic respite. When it kicks back into full force around five minutes, though, it soars with a truly heroic set of guitar figures and city-levelling double-bass kicks. None of this is revolutionary on its face, but the execution is ferociously impassioned.
The closing track “Forever Night” solidifies all of these impressions, starting off with a sort of mathy, post-punk vibe, atop which is laid a lattice of jangling guitar and post-rock drones. The blasting and larynx-shredding vocals start around two minutes in, and from there to the end of the album it’s a perfectly anthemic whirlwind. Everything pauses near the four-minute mark for a sweeping piano run, distant and treated as if heard through another life’s anteroom. And then, oh my, my, my sweet mercy the riff that bursts into life right at the five-minute mark is heart-rendingly triumphant. It’s the sort of riff and chord progression combination that I hear and immediately know I’m being emotionally manipulated, but when it’s happening all around me and my head is buried so deeply inside of this song that it forms the entire universe, I just can’t care. It’s a perfect riff, perfectly positioned halfway through this perfect song, and it serves as a pivot, a hinge for the song to hold your hand and carry you through the last mile of the album. Whatever your opinion of the rest of the album, if you make it through this song and still feel somehow unmoved, then there is probably something broken inside of you. I am convinced that you will not hear a better black metal song this year.
I suspect the dudes in Anagnorisis have their own ideas about what it means to hold on to American black metal, but like I said, “America” is a discursive move that can both open up or shut down, equal parts liberating and suffocating. The important point for me is that anyone trying to use “USBM” as a scornful epithet these days is a grouchy dinosaur without any factual support, because the “genre” (such as it is) spans all the way from the earliest miscreants (Von, Profanatica, Judas Iscariot, Demoncy, etc.) to the post-iest, swirliest modern iconoclasts (Wolves in the Throne Room, Deafheaven, and yes, Liturgy). American black metal is a sprawling continent; a manifest destiny yet to be frozen in place, ossified, and made into a museum piece. It’s a thing that moves and lives and breathes and, frankly, doesn’t need your recognition. I think Anagnorisis understands this, and it’s why Beyond All Light, despite speaking in a familiar language, still sounds boldly new and ultimately vital.
That’s an un-forgetting worth holding on to.
