WEATHER SYSTEMS

Anathema

Experimental/Post Metal

4.04 | 964 ratings

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Roland113
Special Collaborator
Honorary Collaborator

So yeah, I spent four hours on a plane the other day, most of the time writing reviews of albums that I bought in 2012 as I wrestled with my top ten.

Untouchable, Part 1 is one of my favorite songs of the year and the reason that I bought the release from iTunes (that and I won an iTunes gift card at work). It's a fantastic mix of acoustic over heavy guitar with a driving energetic feel, featuring a nice turn around in the chorus. Guest vocalist Lee Douglas adds a special element to the song with her plaintive warbling. Part two is a nice enough ballad, not my typical cup of tea but it is well done.

'Gathering of the Clouds' features some wonderful Spanish guitar for the first two minutes only to kill the anticipation of a driving groove by dropping back into the mellow 'Lightning Song'. The album spends the next few songs in a state of perpetual build up without ever making it anywhere. By the time the energy finally kicks back up in 'The Storm Before the Calm', I'm already aggravated. Luckily, the electronica influenced groove, brought me down off the ledge . . . for a minute or two before it descended into a few minutes of irritation over drums. Oh, and then we get back into the melancholy of the previous three songs which pretty much dominates the remainder of the album.

There are a lot of good things on this album; unfortunately many of them go on for way too long. I got real tired of the lull from Untouchable, Part 2 through the first minutes of 'The Storm Before the Calm' then when we finally got there, it never ended, it just decayed. After 'Untouchable, Part 1' I kept waiting for it to recapture the magic and sadly, it never did for me. I'd give it a two and a half star rating with the opening track being good enough to bump the whole package up to a three star rating.

Roland113 | 3/5 | 2013-1-30

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