ANARCHŸ – Sentïence
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Anarchÿ really love their heavy metal umlauts, as they show on their debut longplayer Sentïence. The St. Louis, Missouri based duo consists of Reese Tiller who is in charge of all the instruments, and vocalist Fionn McAuliffe. Both look incredibly young, which might make sense as their band has only been founded in 2020. The longplayer has been preceded by two EPs, and since the longplayer the guys have followed up with two singles, one of which is a cover version of a quarter hour long Vektor song. This already shows what to expect. Although Anarchÿ describe their style as melodic progressive thrash metal, there is also a strong technical side to their music, recalling at times early tech thrash bands like Watchtower and Mekong Delta. The duo is also very open when it comes to song lengths. The half minute opener Realmz.exe is an actual song and not just an intro. This is followed by one of the few tracks with a regular running time: D.E.S.T.R.O.Y. is at five and a half minutes the ideal entry point to Anarchÿ’s sound: it all sounds brutal, yet comes with a lot of melodic guitar parts. The vocals sound like thrash metal performances from the eighties, and at times I even feel reminded of Destruction’s Release from Agony era. Next up is the album’s heart piece, which takes up more than half the running time of the album. The Spectrum of Human Emotion is at thirty-two minutes a downright thrash metal opera. Lesser bands would just have concatenated different song parts just to inflate the song, but Anarchÿ manage to infiltrate the track with lots of recurring motifs that elevate this mammoth track to a higher dimension. Ë is probably only one second long, in finest S.O.D. tradition. Enter The Singularity is at five minutes another more regular track before Waylaid and Abstract Lexical Abyss are two shorties again. The Greatest Curse, at seven minutes also a longer track, is a wonderful exercise in progressive thrash metal that takes me back to my youth when the genre had just started out. Atheus Mortem Rex clocks in at just under two minutes, and Ÿ (More Umlauts, More Metal!) is another micro achievement of just a few seconds length. Sentïence is a self-released album, and while the production could be at times a little more transparent, it still sounds quite great, especially when you consider that this is the duo’s first longplayer. The four long tracks make it to fifty minutes, which might allow us to consider the six short(er) pieces as filler material, or, if we want to be more positive, as humorous intermissions. Anarchÿ have dug deep in the prog tech metal sound of the late eighties and early nineties, and have come up with a winner. Fans of brainy metal that still kicks ass will be delighted. |
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10 songs |
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54:58 minutes |
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***** **** |
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Genre: progressive thrash metal Label: self-released |
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