Unless you live under a tremendously large rock, it will not have escaped your attention that our beloved heavy metal has been gaining interest from more mainstream listeners and media outlets over the last few years. Though some may scoff and gnash their teeth and wail with misplaced ire, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with this increased attention. However, allow me to hazard one tiny prediction: Canada’s A.M.S.G. will never be profiled in the New York Times; never have a concert review featured in the Wall Street Journal; never be knighted with Pitchfork’s Best New Music tag. Anti-Cosmic Tyranny is forty-seven minutes of chaotic, disconcerting, and rather profoundly disturbed black metal. It is also, I hasten to add, skull-crackingly excellent.
Dip your toes into Anti-Cosmic Tyranny at any random point, and you’re likely to land in the midst of what sounds like a fairly orthodox proposition: thin layers of guitar plunk out well-worn tremolo riffs, extremely live-sounding drums clatter away, and a ranting vocalist with a croaking tone not terribly far-removed from Inquisition’s Dagon seethes with sick nightside sermons. The secret strength of this debut full-length, though, is that it’s actually a bit trickier to get a handle on: for every black metal convention gleefully followed, there are at least as many stylistic curveballs and atmospheric sleights-of-hand thrown in with equal and obvious delight.
Opening track “Black Rites of Black Shadows” rides in on some seriously uninviting harsh noise before dropping into a full-speed, spidery riff-sprint that should please even the most hardened collectors of Horna seven-inch splits. Halfway through, though, and a swirling morass of drum fills and clotted guitar lines gives way to a multi-tracked saxophone solo that is absolutely perfectly suited to this album’s utterly bracing and alien atmosphere. Subsequent songs are just as adept at marrying spike-gauntleted severity with peculiar sideways touches: “Sacrificial Chants of Cosmic Separation” eventually stumbles like an overconfident drunk into a curiously muted Celtic Frost swagger, and “Reincarnation of the Sun” takes a pause midway through only to reintroduce itself with a jangly, acoustic post-punk figure more like the Finnish weirdos Circle of Ouroborus than anything out of Norway circa 1993.
But still, despite these strange touches, Anti-Cosmic Tyranny never seems like it’s trying to be self-consciously avant-garde. If you squint your eyes and ignore the noise here, and the saxophone there, and the omnipresent whispers that appear out of nowhere to send a raw-ass chill down your spine, it’s easy enough to feast on this album as a riff-crammed black metal seminar doused in a shrill, sinister atmosphere. To wit, the riff that breaks in about two-and-a-half minutes into album centerpiece “Gnosis Granted from the Bloodline of Fire” is an undeniably world-crushing motif. The song’s final minute-and-a-half sees the return of some slow-shifting, low-register saxophone. When the saxophone joins up with that world-beating riff, it’s a moment of pure bliss, which, in the middle of such a demented album, produces a completely intoxicating and disorienting effect.
If the idea of black metal as NPR dinner party music makes you choke on your own sour bile, then Anti-Cosmic Tyranny is the album for you. Though it was produced with a clear (and even loving) attention to craft, this is violent, uncompromising music for antisocial people. Strap it on and let it rattle your bones.
