Anaal Nathrakh

Passion (for teenage black metal vagina)

It’s 2:30 in the morning and I’m listening to the new Anaal Nathrakh record entitled ‘Passion’.

Anaal Nathrakh are your local cheeky chappies with a penchant for writing naughty blackened core riffs, that are ridiculously fast for no apparent reason. They have been spewing out more records in the last decade than the average teen mother fires out abominations. If you don’t know who Mick Kenney is, just leave it at that. Let’s have a wee listen and see if the Passion is there.

It’s immensely slick produced and highly triggered, more so than an NYC cop about to have a show down with some Hispanics of the local drug cartel. I hate it. It kicks off pretty sharpish, with a short clean intro before the mayhem of toilet fun consumes my ears and my mind encourages me to reach for the stop button on the stereo. I persevere. There are some great Emperor-isms in the music, but I can’t for the life of me think that this is complete generic nuggetry by the numbers and the evidence of any Black Metal influence is non-existent let alone grindcore.

There ARE some good points though, this is a great family record of course. The riffs are well executed and well played. The vocals are hilarious, sometimes sounding like a domestic abuse scenario. The song titles are you usual evil pish, I can‘t particularly distinguish each song because the vocals are continuously fucking tragic/laughable. ‘Post Traumatic Stress Euphoria‘? I‘ve taken a shite that is more appropriately titled than this garbage.

Black Metal used to be dangerous or at least scary sounding (ish), I’d get more thrill giving Ian Huntley my children for the weekend. The detuned dirge of this record is like playing with marshmallows in your lovely Costa hot chocolate. Tunes like Ashes Screaming Silence are more like gentle tickles on the ear rather than sonic devastation.

I really don’t like this record. It’s about as necro as the local Glaswegian graveyard filled with solvent abusers and vampires. Fenriz would not approve. If this is modern day extreme metal then we are extremely fucked, straight in the bum bum. There isn’t any passion (Irony eh!?) behind this record, there’s no attention to detail with the little things, everything is compressed to a flat line and the fucking vocal levels hitting the red to make it sound more extreme isn’t cool and just makes it all sound severely rushed. The snare is repetitive and sound replaced, cut and pasted, slapped, buggered bashed and sodomized into the utter shite it sounds. I’d take St. Anger’s drum sound over this.

Picture an extreme metal guidebook, they have covered nearly everything with this record. An album that isn’t needed, take a 5 year hiatus Anaal Nathrakh and come back with something more captivating. Cradle of Filth covered this stuff a decade ago, as did Emperor with the operatic stuff. Mick Kenney needs to burn a church or something. Death/Fiddler/Chunk core bands are writing better music than this utter fudgey poo, of course, there will be a bunch of folk saying, ‘Aww this is rapid, pyoor fuckin’ extreme and amazing’. They are cretins, don’t listen to them.

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About The Author

Doom
A Black Metal bastard with a love for Old School Death Metal and Dance Pop. When he's not out burning churches or writing Black Metal chaos, he's drinking tea or admiring forests and touching your kids. While admiring forests... obv