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Anacrusis - Screams and Whispers CD (album) cover

SCREAMS AND WHISPERS

Anacrusis

 

Progressive Metal

3.47 | 46 ratings

From Progarchives.com, the ultimate progressive rock music website

MorgothSunshine
4 stars With SCREAMS AND WHISPERS, Anacrusis come out with their best effort since they're amazing debut, SUFFERING HOUR. It's interesting that a band like this could come out with four radically different albums... Their debut was progressive thrash par excellence, REASON dipped into much more atmospheric and moody compositions, and MANIC IMPRESSIONS was a concise and "cleaned-up" metal album. This time around, the band experiments with orchestral arrangements...

The idea isn't new for metal fans, who unfortunately had to endure the ambitiously awful Metallica misfire, S&M. Other metal bands have also tried their hands at this sort of thing with some success, most notably Therion. Anacrusis really does deserve some credit, though, for helping to pioneer this kind of thing...

It's the way that Anacrusis incorperate the symphonic elements into their sound that makes this album so successful... Take "Too Many Prophets," for instance... The strings in this track are seemlessly layered into the songwriting instead of written OVER it... Part of the reason why S&M simply didn't work was because it simply sounded like an orchestra playing over Metallica. SCREAMS AND WHISPERS, on the other hand, sound like the songs couldn't stand on their own without the classical elements. There's some absolutely stunning subtle-string work in "Tools of Seperation" that really adds to the song. That's another thing... Anacrusis doesn't go overboard and saturate their music with too much of that orchestral work. They find a great balance that really compliments both of the aspects at work here. The classical elements really lend a sense of grandeur to the song "Grateful." The band really deserve applause for pulling this off so well.

Stand-out non-symphonic tracks include the amazing "Sound the Alarm," which is one of the best songs in the band's cannon, "Sense of Will," and the catchy "Release." You can download the entire album from Anacrusis' website, so what are you waiting for?!?!

MorgothSunshine | 4/5 |

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