Маятник жизни

I had the rare pleasure of being among the first people to review AnDem’s stunner Daughter of the Moonlight for EM (an album I truly adored and still do), and also their now nine-year-old EP Eternity. Going back to review the Moscow melodic metallurgists’ première album, Life’s Pendulum [Маятник жизни] therefore has the indelible feeling of a trip down nostalgia lane.

One thing that kind of doesn’t help in reviewing Life’s Pendulum after getting familiar with the rest of their output, is that several of the songs are indeed found elsewhere in AnDem’s discography. ‘From Nothing’ and ‘Mad Angel’ find re-recordings first on Grail, and then on Eternity. ‘I See the Eyes’ is the closer for their most recent album, My Game. And ‘Winter Tears of Silver’ is (unfortunately) re-recorded on (you guessed it) Winter Tears. Reading between the liner notes, Serge Polunin seems to be one of those perfectionistic musical geniuses who can’t ever quite leave a song concept be, and has to rearrange and recompose it every few years or so, just to get it to sound closer to the way he imagines it in his head. As a writer of fiction, that’s a struggle I can well understand and sympathise with.

Okay, man—the ideas, though! Life’s Pendulum may have a rather too-obvious Edgar Allan Poe inspiration at the surface that reminds one a bit too strongly of that Nightwish album, and an oboe-heavy and operatic-femvox intro track to match. But musically speaking, this album reads as the full-palette first stab of a thirsty young band that’s veritably bristling with ideas and raw talent. You kind of have to ignore the audio quality, which has a bit of the basement-mixing problem, and listen to the compositions beneath.

AnDem gives us a series of what are essentially brilliant rough sketches of songs that they would go back and touch up repeatedly. Even if the riffs and melodic hooks are fairly basic in structure, they’re still delivered with an energy that makes up for it. You have here in ample quantity the beauty-and-the-beast vocal baton-passing between Juliana Shevchenko and her session male counterparts which would be refined to a razor’s edge on Daughter of the Moonlight.

The basic delivery on ‘From Nothing’ and ‘Mad Angel’ has all the conviction and freshness of a first try, and it’s interesting to compare them to the more polished pieces on Eternity. Juli Savchenko lacks a little bit in vocal discipline, which you can tell from those falsetto flips she tags on the end of her lyrical lines, but she performs with soul. That’s critical. And the presence of soul is what distinguishes the performance of ‘Winter Tears of Silver’ on this album to its pale, drawn, substanceless shadow on Winter Tears.

You can hear a bit more variety on here too than on later albums, of the sort that comes with a young band which is fighting for a niche. This first take on ‘I See the Eyes’, for example, uses black metal ‘beast’ vocals on top of a major hook that sounds like it could have come off the Yamaha DX-7 soundtrack for a cheesy 80s adventure movie (or an old 16-bit DOS game from a bit later). Even though the version on My Game has been given the ol’ devil’s downtune, and submitted to a clean-vocals ballsy power metal treatment, and just overall sounds better—there’s a certain kind of gutsy charm that operates on a level of experimentation and ‘no-one-told-me-I-couldn’t’ sincerity in this Life’s Pendulum version.

It would be more than a bit misguided to place this album in the same league as Daughter of the Moonlight or My Game, both of which showcase a more mature and streamlined sound. But Life’s Pendulum is still an excellent and solid spin, and easily worth the eight bucks or so you can get the CD version for used.

16 / 20