The Burial Tree (II)

Originally written for The Inarguable.

Ana Kefr is a progressive metal band. They reside on the West Coast of the United States, specifically in Riverside, California. The band was formed by Kyle Coughran and Rhiis D. Lopez back in 2008. Since their founding, they have added more members and released a full length and a single. The bands newest release, The Burial Tree (II) is once again pushing the boundaries of heavy metal. This band is very different, and I stress the word different heavily. I can name drop a few bands to give you a frame of reference, but it would be best to listen to this band with an open mind, free of name drops and other aspects that might detract from the listening experience that Ana Kefr provides. Ana Kefr writes about an array of topics ranging from religion to politics and human rights to philosophy. If this doesn’t put them in their own category, then let me add a little more. Ana Kefr has toured with Exodus, Into Eternity, My Ruin, Taproot, and Death By Stereo. This list alone is all over the place. This has been a difficult band to review and The Burial Tree (II) is quite an album... Yeah, here it goes…

If you are going to listen to this album, it must be listened to as a whole. Everything weaves together to create this awesome aural experience and to break it apart track by track would take from the album rather than contribute. However, I can contribute these points, this band is pushing the boundaries of heavy metal, and there is no doubt about it. I haven’t listened to something so new, innovative, and refreshing in many years. Not only is Ana Kefr pushing the boundaries, but they are doing it with a very heavy sound and with many influences. When listening to the album, I heard everything from progressive metal to metalcore to death metal and even post rock! This band brings quite a big breath of fresh air to the realm of old, recycled ideas, and they are young; meaning they have much more to bring to the table and much more time to gain the fame they deserve.

I feel like I have to name some standout tracks before I conclude, so here are some to start. “Thaumatrope” is probably my favorite track on the album, followed by the two closing tracks, “The Blackening” and “The Collector”. These three tracks should be a good place to get you started (if you must break this album down on a song to song basis). Overall, this album was great. I thoroughly enjoyed each song and I especially.enjoyed how creatively the band was able to weave this whole album together. I highly recommend this album to all fans of heavy metal, especially those who favor progressive metal above all.

(This review can also be viewed on ultimate-guitar.com)

Oh my f***ing Science! The second album from Ana Kefr, The Burial Tree, is unlike any other album. You pretty much have to be crazy not to enjoy it.

Listening to The Burial Tree with the lyrics in front of you is like watching a foreign movie with subtitles. You experience chaotic, intense dialogue that requires focus; simultaneously an onslaught of rapidly changing images where deep concentration is mandatory to absorb the basic storyline. It is plain to see that an excessive amount of thought has been put into this. The lyrics are stimulating and controversial, and the music grabs hold and steers you face-to-face with the brutal truth.

This album is splendidly extreme and progressive. AK mixes several genres of music within the songs while still maintaining that unique quality which is metal. They also use a variety of instruments including saxophone, clarinet, a stand-up bass, and even a rattlesnake’s rattle in “Thaumatrope.” “In the House of Distorted Mirrors” makes you feel as if you are a reflection, bouncing every which way. There are also some incredible solos, played by Brendan Moore, which can seriously tug at your heartstrings or jerk out tears. Each instrument takes a separate role in the music, adding its own unique voice, creating layers in the songs. That is especially apparent with the underlying presence and complementary spotlight on the bass. It leads us into the garden of “Emago,” mourns a melancholy interruption in “Monody,” and assists the keys with setting the mood at the beginning of “Apoptosis.”

Vocally, Rhiis D. Lopez is vastly versatile. There is a broad range of vocal styles implemented throughout, from flawless clean vocals to terrifying growls, and a mixture of the two (which I will name clean growls). Backing vocals create a distorted sense of reality. Hats off to the female guest vocalist, Nikki Simmons (Stay the Night), who embraced a few songs with her radiant operatic solos. She has the ability to send pulsing goosebumps down your spine with her voice in “The Collector,” every time you listen to it.

The lyrics are a cornucopia of powerful one-liners. For example, “The tree of wisdom bears the fruit of Blasphemy (Emago)” and “We are the Children of Perdition, basking in the glow of their churches burning (Ash-Shahid).” Ana Kefr translated from Arabic means “I am infidel,” and the use of Arabic and ancient eastern language is also prevalent throughout the album in songs like “Ash-Shahid,” and “The Blackening.” Just for a taste of the nature of some of these lyrics, here is a line from opener, “Ash-Shahid:”

“In this, our hour of judgment, humanity is violently redeemed. Thena’ Shaitan! Ana [al-] Dajjal! Enta Shaitan – and every knee may bow except for mine.” Try using the Google phonetic translator to figure that one out.

Ana Kefr’s second album, The Burial Tree, actually makes me feel smarter by listening to it. It is brutally savage whilst beautifully poetic. Ana Kefr has a daring and extreme message to the world that they stand by with pride. I feel as though, with this album, AK is congratulating the world by saying, “Don’t worry about going to Hell. You’re already here!”

Music groups would have to be careful when coming at the listener under the guise of being “progressive death metal”. Not that they wouldn’t have any kind of capacity to do the genre justice; it’s just that the style can be pretty unforgiving. Outside of later-era Death and Opeth, many progressive death metal acts I’ve come across try to put so much into their overall sound that it leaves you cold and unwelcome in their musical way of things (though Death has done this, too, from time to time…). It takes both a keen ear to appreciate and keen fingers to write, the way I see it.

So with that said, let’s see if Ana Kefr have the capacity to make it all work in the end…

Certainly, this album possesses a sound that truly betrays the cover art (something that tickles me in the right places time and again), and no doubt the band has a specific idea as to what they want to sound like. This is what saves them from entering Weirdsville throughout “The Burial Tree (II)” (sometimes…); this is some well-thought out material, tackling melody and intensity like a group of professionals with more than half their teeth cut by time and ability. The riffs and harmonies themselves exist on a plane that could very well be seen as foreign and alien, which helps the album continue to maintain interest on my end. I was drawn in as the tracks progressed, kinda wanting to see what would happen next, and the change-ups of tempo and overall madness kept them from stagnating, even though a bit of normalcy in the arrangements would have helped in the long run (it’s a tricky thing to jump from one idea to the next without a safety net, the way I see it); between the blast-beating frenzies, the snail-crawling passages, the brutal, symphonic tandems and the deathcore-ish breakdowns, I sorta felt lost as I proceeded through the album, and no matter how fancy and creative the passages may have been, this sort of chaotic abandon is still a tricky bitch to control and master no matter how hard one can try. And for that I can’t fault Ana Kefr, and can still enjoy what they have to offer me. This is still a pretty impressive disc, chock full of monstrous riffs, haunting synth leads, crushing drum work, and insidious growls betraying a bit of the progressive feel, which itself is honored by way of the more upbeat harmonic elements, echoed clean singing and even some clarinet thrown in for good measure (and it FITS!) unleashing torrents of impure anger and very Funeral Mist-y lyrics pertaining to the evils of religion (and rightfully so!) and other dark, misanthropic tales. And it’s in that honesty that the band truly shines; there’s no real BS here, and songs like “Emago”, “Monody” and “Thaumatrope” augment those sensations quite nicely.

At the end of the day, Ana Kefr’s latest is a strange little number that contains a lot of good ideas as well as some mish-mashing. This might not appeal to your average Joe Beergut metal-head, but for those of us that want some intelligence and flair with our metal, this may be a good little distraction from the outside world. Though its limited appeal may be too narrow for its own good...

If the cliche 'biting off more than you can chew' was given a tangible musical embodiment, than that corporeal entity's name might damn well be Ana Kefr, a California group promoting their sophomore effort. I haven't heard anything of its predecessor, but The Burial Tree is an overwhelming conflagration of ideas that has almost no precedent in about 30-40 years of extreme music. The intelligence and circumference of such an album is almost unfathomable, but that turns out to be both its blessing and curse, because while the ears will easily accustom to most of the individual threads being woven through its crushing philosophical landscape, the cumulative effect of the album is more one of bewilderment at its variation than staying power.

In other words, I must have shrieked 'how did they do that' a dozen or so times in listening through the album, but rarely did I feel like like hitting rewind to relive those moments. Ana Kefr performs an abomination of modern black, death and thrash metal, with some metalcore styled chug breakdowns (as in the bridge of "Emago"), and additional elements of world music, jazz and progressive rock coursing through its veins like heroin. It's a spastic yet measured collection of compositions, 14 strong and over 60 minutes in length, with the band rarely ever stepping on its own toes as it continues to morph through its dynamic range. They've a pretty talented front man in Rhiis D. Lopez who can snarl, growl, spit and even sing as if he were a living manifestation of limbo, a patchwork of extreme metal, indie rock and collisions stranger yet, and all manner of pianos, synthesizers, female vocals and other bits are sewn into the tumult.

The problem is that the band hurls so much in your direction that they outpace themselves, almost never falling victim to any semblance of repetition, like "Thaumatrope" with its incessant mystique and hammering of melodic death rhythms, or "Monody" with its colossal climate shifts between glazes of melody and progressive swelters. Certain components, like the female vocals in "Monody" feel entirely unnecessary, as if their presence were just to further diversify the aural palette. Tracks like "Apoptosis", "The Zephirus Circus" or the painfully brief "Jeremiad" experiment with acoustics and almost classical or Vaudevillian pianos, but they abandon them too quickly in the rush toward spastic metallic outpourings, and I would have liked to hear a better balance of the tranquility and excess. My favorite track on the album was either "Bathos and the Iconoclast" or the scurrying dementia of "In the House of Distorted Mirrors", both of which slightly rose above the turmoil and better molested my senses. Just the fact that they have a song called "Paedophilanthrope" molests my senses...

Despite my lukewarm reaction to this album, let it be said that Ana Kefr are without a doubt one of the most unique voices on the US metal landscape that I've heard in years, occupying a rare hybrid dimension of Between the Buried and Me, Cradle of Filth, The Mars Volta and Pink Floyd. Yes, you read that correctly. Each player here is technically gifted enough to compete with the maniacal climatology of their compositions, and naturally the sky is the limit for what they could achieve if this energy became focused in on more effective writing. The Burial Tree is well mixed, especially for so wide and busy a range of sound. I might have been left in the dust by this particular construct, but if you're hunting for explosions of aggressive, progressive cross pollination, then the Californians are certainly worth a listen to determine your own response.

-autothrall
http://www.fromthedustreturned.com