Review by Dave Wolff
Rating: *****
http://www.myspace.com/anachronaeon
With the seemingly endless (and ultimately pointless) debates concerning whether MySpace or Face Book is a more worthwhile social networking community, I have made contacts for my fanzine Autoeroticaspxhyxium who have proven extremely supportive, including Will Lovelaw who has recently become a new staff writer. In turn he recommended a band he was in touch with called Anachronaeon. Hailing from Sweden (where Bathory, Marduk and Entombed originate from, of course), Anachronaeon is a brutal/progressive death metal band consisting of two members. After contacting frontman Patrik Carlsson we agreed on trades and interviews, and I took the liberty of checking out a few of their songs. “The Beast Called Man” first spoke to me for some reasons; one was Carlsson’s use of classical guitar solos within their formula. The other reason was its content, a self-explanatory fictional account on the darker side of human nature as told through the eyes of someone who lost his entire family to war. The presentation of this just scratches the surface of how deeply the band delve into the twisted psychology (to coin a phrase from Slayer) of humankind. In his interview Carlsson volunteered a great deal of insight into the lyrical content of this album and Anachronaeon’s lyrics in general. This is a band that obviously considers the message of their music as important as the heavy-and-technical backdrops they are penned to, as they reflect on the evils living beneath superficial impressions of everyday normalcy in more ways than one. Loss, regret, isolation and the realization of one’s own malevolence are connected with people who willingly and blindly conform to the demands of organized religion, the business world and society as a whole. The ideas and concepts explored here are going to be expanded upon with their new full length The Ethereal Throne.