The Call of the Void

With the 2015 eponymous album long gone and it appears those days of somehow oddly hand-crafted cover artworks as well, the American band heads off into the realms of Escher and something less tangible; i.e., the void. Is this their swansong, then? Will they offer themselves into the vastness of this sphere, then? Well, the cover does not answer this question in a clear cut way. Though it is necessary to remind on Nietzsche in this regard: "And if you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you.(1)"

And things have changed over the last few years. The band has a new logo for instance and it does not appear on the cover of this latest release. In fact, there is no logo whatsoever this output. Surprisingly, also the pumpkin head is gone. Also the new tracks are shorter compared with the 2015 release and on total roughly around a minute less on average. Old stuff appears to have been thrown overboard to a good amount and the band is able to present itself renewed and a different light; hint: logo. Of course the obvious question arises and demands an answer on whether the music on The Call of the Void is any good or whether it is some kind of boring bland copy that is just sold under a different banner?

If you look into the abyss, or if you look into the void, then this might leave an imprint on you as a person. Anticosm apparently glanced into one or the other deep sink-holes of other artistic approaches to music and you can hear this throughout the album. It is still the same band, though. There are still the same vocals. There are still some of the ways they like to play black metal. But there is something different as well. Not only in terms of the atmosphere a slight shift can be examined, also the riffs show some new approaches and some other ideas have made it in this album; somehow it would be nice to know how many ideas have not made it on this recording and were scrapped in the process of crafting and recording it. Four years are a long time.

Thrash and black metal are still the dominant part on this recording and the band never leaves these shores. While it may be a bit rockish or experimental now and then, Anticosm have a definite opinion about how their music is supposed to sound and what they want to play. In fact, the band has never ventured away from some basic path over all those years they have been active already. While the presentation reveal to a larger extent a certain level of playfulness and variation, the music is generally quite straight-forward and on the spot. While the level of vocals at times (for instance Behold the Venom Crystals) is something not all listeners find as something to cherish, like the writer of these lines, others will look at it with a milder perspective. Generally though, this aspect is of little impact and what will linger with the listener are the well crafted tracks. The bottom line of the music is a mixture of melodic black metal with strong influences from the thrash metal scene. It cannot be pointed towards a clear cut separation of these two genres, as these are generally thrown together and vary in degree in terms of each of the tracks.

A track like The Only Truth is definitely fun to listen to. There are a lot of catchy elements in it, the way the song progresses is really cool and how the guitars lead the listener along is quite nice. Stylistically, it can be summed up as a melodic thrash black metal piece. But this is not everything the band has to offer. Strangely enough, the band closes the album with something that has quite a lot of punk in it. Never Enough has an entirely different vibe. With only three minutes in length, there is not much time to get shit done, so the band throws even more towards the listener over a shorter period of time. The outcome should be obvious. The intensity with which The Call of the Void closes is not a deviation from what the band presented in the preceding tracks, but rather a distillation of sounds that would otherwise have been spread over a longer period of time. Scorched Earth the shortest track lacks the punk and is more on the intense black metal side of the aisle. What is strange in this respect is how the succeeding title track opens in a calm acoustic kind of way. So much for keeping the pace and the flow of it all.

The music of Anticosm always had a certain level of intensity to it. While the earlier albums always came over as merely something that would work on stage -- not a bad thing per se -- those latest tracks have a different atmosphere. While the dynamics are generally at a rather higher pace, the band does not venture for the minimalism in terms of the riffs that can be found in the thrash metal scene. Rather it is a certain attitude, riffs and energy that this genre is contributing to their performance. On the other hand, the black metal sets the basic tone for sound, intensity and atmosphere. While this has been the fact for all of their previous releases, this latest one is more nuanced. It is more laid back at times as calm counterpoints have been added to the brew. That makes it difficult to pinpoint to other bands of reference. It is easier to what Anticosm is not like, than to offer a conclusive band that might been an influences and whose sounds can be discovered here. So, in order to do this pointless effort justice, some bands are thrown in here: Barbatos, Watain, but not Darkthrone.

All in all it is a quite good album. The production is quite good as well and there is not much to complain about. The song-writing is good and the same can be said of the production. Definitely recommended, especially as the band dares be different.

What is it that the abyss has shown them, then?

1: https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Friedrich_Nietzsche