ALBUM REVIEW: The Anticurrent – Omega Infinity
When two musicians from bands that are regarded as being at the forefront of their style collaborate together on a new project, expectations are inevitably high. This was certainly the case when Xenoyr of NE OBLIVISCARIUS and Tentakel P. of German avant-garde black metallers TODTGELICHTER joined forces as OMEGA INFINITY back in 2018. The first material from the band came in the form of their debut album Solar Spectre, an impressive record that blended blackened death metal with a palpable progressive and industrial undercurrent, giving the album a harsh intensity that showed plenty of promise for this new outfit. Three years on, the band are back with their second record The Anticurrent, an album that builds on the strengths of their debut, making use of not only broader musical influences, but also a number of guest appearances for yet another memorable experience.
The Alpha, with its dense guitars, intricate drumming and tortured vocals, proves to be a chaotic opener, with different elements merging together as a repetitive piano piece provides the only constant. As it progresses, the music becomes more ordered, revealing lean blackened death metal centred around tight hooks, powerful vocals and ethereal ambience to salvage what was initially a fairly murky start. Creation takes the heady ambience of the previous track and applies a spacey quality to it. It’s got a solid progressive edge, with technical flourishes and sudden shifts in tone and tempo making for an engrossing and impressive offering.
Iron Age‘s forceful sound, galloping rhythms and droning, djent leads are fairly straightforward and less intense, although the soaring ambience of the keyboards and Adrienne Cowan‘s haunting and arid vocals add a palpable atmosphere that helps to elevate this track significantly. Banish Us From Eden possesses a harsher guitar sound and eerie, disjointed keyboards, lending a sense of foreboding which takes the form of bleak black metal with driving drums and hellish vocals, injecting a darker side into proceedings that makes this relatively brief number extremely memorable. To The Stars follows in a similar vein, albeit with polished, electronic keyboard sections, with the urgent pace of the drums and guitars creating a claustrophobic feeling that is only accentuated by the vocals, again taking a classic sound and giving it a sharper production and progressive moments.
Death Rays, with its monolithic, hypnotic sound, sombre guitars, bombastic keys and monstrous gutturals, is another song that blends the aggressive and progressive together perfectly. The dramatic spoken word accompaniment from Lindsay Schoolcraft is a great touch that adds a beguiling, cinematic edge – a subtle flourish that makes this even more impressive. Voices From The End Of Time is a sprawling slab of caustic blackened death metal that showcases the band at their most ferocious, with the unrelentingly grating and intense whirlwind of jarring guitars, frenetic drumming and searing, acidic vocals sounding thoroughly unhinged at points. The blistering pace gradually shifts to a funereal crawl, allowing the heady ambience of the keys to come to the fore and making for a bombastic and grand conclusion to the record.
The addition of two covers, one of Night Journey by SEAR BLISS and the other being of the classic EMPEROR track Ye Entrancemperium, feel a little unnecessary after the preceding track, but both utilise some impressive flourishes to make them memorable. It’s interesting to hear Andras Nagy perform guest vocals on a song that he originally sang on, and this more urgent and energetic version sounds fantastic. The cover of Ye Entrancemperium similarly makes full use of the modern production and dense industrial keyboards to give this this already timeless black metal offering a futuristic makeover.
The Anticurrent does possess a lot of the components, style and production wise, that made Solar Spectre such an impressive debut, but there are some subtler elements at play that make this new album a little more impressive. The keyboards play a much more significant role in the overall sound on this record, cloaking the music in a great ambience that really accentuates the spacey and industrial parts of the band’s sound, and the blackened death metal at the core seems decidedly more focused than on their debut. Couple this with the eclectic range from the guest vocalists, and the immersive vocal talents of Xenoyr, which are on full display from start to finish, and you’ve got an album that is as strong vocally as it is musically. The two covers that close the album do feel a bit redundant after the magnificence of Voices From The End Of Time, but they are nonetheless excellent modern reimaginings of established black metal classics, and it’s hard to find fault with the album on any other front. Far from feeling like an afterthought or vanity project as some side projects have a tendency to, it’s clear that a lot of attention to detail has been placed in the songwriting for The Anticurrent, making for a much more layered and engrossing record as a result.
Rating: 8/10
The Anticurrent is out now via Season Of Mist.
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