Manic Impressions

There's a scene in an old Buster Keaton comedy called "The General" that I find strangely appropriate to my vision of the early 90's thrash scene. In that film Keaton plays a train engineer during the Civil War who goes on an adventure to reclaim his engine after it is hijacked by a group of Unionist spies. During one very memorable sequence Keaton commandeers another train in order to pursue the spies, with a Confederate army racing along beside him. Unfortunately, as Keaton feverishly chops up wood to fuel the train, he fails to notice the tide of the battle around him turning as the Confederates encounter a vastly superior Unionist army. Imagine his surprise then when, finally looking up his exertions, he realizes he is in strange territory, behind enemy lines.

I imagine a similar look of blank incomprehension crossing over the face of any number of late-for-dinner thrash acts, thinking that they've finally headbanged their way to the top only to look up from their axes and see nothing heavy around save for grunge and industrial. Anacrusis were one such band, releasing their first album in '88, seeing it finally published by a label of note in 1990 (the last year of thrash's golden age) almost simultaneously with their second. A few short years earlier thrashers could rest reasonably easy after having released two relatively successful LPs, assured that a market would remain for their next platter. Anacrusis hit their prime just as the market was withering on the vine, thrash rendered hopelessly passé by a flooded market, the great stars of the game evolving into something much different. Many bands simply disappeared overnight.

Anacrusis however had more in common with Buster Keaton than might seem immediately apparent. When he realized his predicament, he didn't just sit down and wait for death to claim him. No, he tapped into heretofore unseen depths of resiliency and perspicacity. And so too did Anacrusis, a band gifted with an unusually talented songwriter in vocalist/guitarist Kenn Nardi and chops for miles. The band had already demonstrated a capacity for mutability, from the schizoid array of styles on Suffering Hour to the abrupt about-face into the smog-choked doom-hardcore-thrash of Reason, and Manic Impressions too reinvented their sound.

Gone are the overt punk influences present on Reason, the churning grooves, the disjointed structures in favour of a kind of dramatic grandiosity glimpsed on tracks like "Wrong". Manic Impressions in an album of size, an album of ideas and emotions that these musicians considered important enough to couch inside big songs. Yet these compositions tend to cohere extremely well with few distinguishable 'sections' per se, more of an ebb and flow of light and darkness (or, more aptly, grey and black). There's definitely something of a prog sensibility on songs like "What You Became", languorous despairing melodic bits interspersed with droning doom and the occasional explosion of shattering speed as if the frustration has finally boiled over into a rage which is quickly smothered.

This approach can of course easily grow tiresome when mishandled, and Anacrusis do occasionally allow themselves to become a bit soggy as they wallow in despair. Exacerbating matters is the incredible rigidity of the playing and production, the album's frigid reputation entirely deserved. The songs are rarely allowed to really breathe, even brisk and relatively catchy fair like "Our Reunion" pummelled by the crappy, shallow drum production and extremely compressed guitar tone. It's fortunate that John Emery's very prominent bass is at least quasi-organic and appropriately muscular, giving the album a bit of much-needed sonic depth.

Speaking of Emery, his bass is also key to grounding band's understated psychedelic vibes, his dreamy yet robust figures anchoring the Floydian explorations that crop up on occasion, often complemented by some truly crystalline lead trade-offs between Nardi and Heidbreder. It's a mood seldom really captured by anything pre-Tiamat/My Dying Bride, yet "Explained Away" seems to encapsulate drifting into ennui as well as anything either of those bands accomplished. The only examples of contemporaries managing the feat that spring to mind are Bill Ward's War One: Along the Way and of course, Voivod (and, come to think of it, perhaps later Coroner). There's some of it on compact closing epic "Far Too Long", an ambitious and emotional art rock song that sounds as if it were processed through a computer, leaving it purified but nerve-dead. Yet in its very detachment it achieves a sort of perfection, a numbing shellshock that speaks more of the scope of what has been lost than any amount of heartsick whinging. When the band introduces a few moments of delicate acoustic guitar, the freezing whisper of melancholy is truly chilling.

In spite of the grim vibes the record gives off, there are moments of relief. The relatively brief speedsters like "Dream Again" and "Paint a Picture" manage to be both catchy and intense, songs in which the headbanging well exceeds the mope-quotient, and "Still Black" is an authentic riff-monster. Well-chosen cover "I Love the World" manages to provide most of the album's few truly connecting moments, the creeping, synth-distorted Queensrÿche-like verses emerging into a bitingly sarcastic chorus, the song an awe-inspiring demonstration of slow-burning malice.

Quite frankly, I became bored of most garden-variety of thrash some time ago, preferring the fractal panic of technical death to the repetitive chug of thrash for my speed-freak fix. I remain enamoured with Anacrusis because of their eccentricity, their bravery and most of all their willingness to transcend whatever limits people thought should be set around what they did. In "The General", Buster Keaton doesn't always make the best choices, but his inability to quit carried him along the tracks until he had gained his goal. Anacrusis' journey is also one of breakneck forward motion. They never made a perfect record, but each album was an improvement over the last, culminating in their very best, 1993's Screams & Whispers. Every step they took along the way is an object lesson in the value of perseverance, and a helluva listen.

Stand-Out Tracks: "Something Real", "Far Too Long", "I Love the World"

[Note: In 2006 main brain behind the band Kenn Nardi released a remixed version of the album which beefed up the sound of the album and included a number of minor changes to the songs that brought the album more in line with what Nardi saw as his 'vision' of the album. I be reviewed this version of the record, available from the band's official webpage, though my comments should be applicable to either version. I did not, however, include the brilliant early version of "Tools of Separation" that Nardi decided to reinsert into Manic Impressions in my analysis, as it's more in the nature of a bonus track. - OSS]