Antichrist

This is Akercocke's final album to their moderately successful career. I've taken quite an interest into the band after hearing "Leviathan" off the "Choronzon" album. Akercocke are probably one of the biggest and best death/black metal acts to come out of the UK (let's be honest, we're not known for producing good black/death metal bands, but there are some good ones from the UK out there). What I like about Akercocke is their mix between the two sub-genres of black and death metal whilst adding an almost doom-like impression to their music. "Antichrist" is no exception.

I have all of Akercocke's albums barring the "Rape of the Bastard Nazarene" album, but I can quite clearly see throughout their albums how each one has progressed and the "Antichrist" album is the icing on the cake for the band because after listening to four tracks of this album I can tell this is Akercocke's best work, in my opinion. The band bring out this almost technical side of their musical talents which I can't help thinking has been kept away in the band's locker for some time now for whatever reason. At different parts of the first four tracks, Akercocke have shown their technical side with pitch-perfect guitar solos whilst in previous albums the musical content has been very much all about making Satanic and ear-blasting content, which has lead to very much average sounding black/death metal albums with few technical qualities, but it can't be said for "Antichrist". It is just that level up from previous albums. Furthermore, going on from what I have just said, I feel the band have more control over the tempo of their music whilst I feel in previous albums it was just doing what it wanted to do without carefully looking at how organised the musical content was (this can't be said for all the songs made on the last albums as there are a few good sounding songs in the last few albums). In "Antichrist", they've organised their tempo of their music to a much better standard and have given the listener more of a chance to catch up with the music and hear the musical qualities of each band member, the drums and guitars especially.

The production on this album is also very good (it has been on the past two albums), but because the band has progressively been much better at the organisation of their music, the production has allowed the music to sound so much clearer in the instruments and the high- pitched guitar solos sound perfect because of this. Furthermore, I feel Jason (the vocalist) sounds at his best in this album when he does the cleaner vocals which adds that bit more variety in Akercocke's music in this album. Furthermore, Akercocke do like to add other musical instruments or sounds. For example, the cello and the clarinet have been used in previous albums and the band try to add this almost electronic-type of sound in track 8, "The Dark Inside".

On the whole, I have to say this is Akercocke's best album by a long shot. It just has that extra musical quality that I personally have not heard in any of their previous albums. Whether that is because they have had more freedom to do what they want, being there last album, or they've just put a little bit more effort into it, I don't know. A great shame that this band split up when it did.