Anaal Nathrakh’s ‘Passion’ sounds like the final evolutionary step of heavy metal music. It combines unspeakably extreme, wall-of-sound mixing, absurdly fast and intricate drums, searing riffs with the most violent vocals imaginable. Frequently, the shrieking departs from the standard death-metal howls and enters a dark new territory of disturbingly convincing pained-yelps, and hoarse, tearful cries. AN has long been one of the honored and reviled chaplains of extreme metal, and with this release, they have offered up the audio equivalent to a mass-extinction event. It’s the noise of pigs being slaughtered, the treads of tanks shredding through bones and flesh. If music is ever going to be fully weaponized, these British bastards are at the top of the list.
Metal of course isn’t for everyone and extreme metal has an even smaller audience, and while AN is arguably the most extreme of them all, but they still have quite a large fan base. Maybe it’s the near-genius level of detail they infuse into every release or their uncompromising death-metal discipline, or maybe they’ve become a sort of freak-show where they push themselves to out-heavy their previous record with every successive release. Much like an eating contest, I’m not interested unless the contestants are consuming either horrifying quantities of food, or the food is itself horrifying. Nathrakh combines both worlds of the extreme-metal eating contest. They stand for the beauty that is black metal in that they record what they want to hear, not what they think will get more praise or reach a wider group.
Anaal Nathrakh doesn’t concern itself with pandering to those intolerant to their brutality.
‘Passion’ is one of those amorphous records where the song order doesn’t really matter, and you might not notice if you left it on shuffle and ended up listening to a few songs multiple times. When music gets this absurdly over-the-top, it is difficult to make each song sound like a singular, self-contained track, rather than another full-blast ultra-lethal noisecrime. That being said, there are some stand-out tracks like ‘Tod Heutet Uebel’ and ‘Who Thinks of The Executioner?’, but these aren’t notable for their powerful and unique structures or writing, but for the fact that they employ dramatically different vocal styles than previous songs. ‘Tod Heutet Uebel’ is performed in howling, weeping German and ‘…Executioner’ is characterized by off-mic hacking and choking sounds, which honestly add a new and terrifying layer to the already haunting sounds. Beyond that, though, most of the tracks tend to run together, the instruments don’t change much and neither does the tempo.
Additionally, it’s a very brief recording. Clocking out at just over 35 minutes, ‘Passion’ barely has enough time for the listener to begin to appreciate its raw power before it reaches its final, closing minutes. The candle that burns twice as bright, etc. It’s a noticeable fault in the record and it hurts the final product. If it had just a few more tracks, maybe a change of pace here and there, it would be a candidate for extreme album of the year, at least in my book. While it does boast some vehemently powerful tracks, some songs that you’ll want to hear over and over to appreciate their weighty candor; the record is crippled by a short play time and a lack of diversity. Because of this, I have to give it an 8.4/10.0.
Thanks for reading,
W.
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