Ivory Tower
This is Jägermeister Metal :)
Anyways, the music is all but melancholic, it conveys a deep sense of positivity and strength instead:
towards the sun!
Favorite track: Vision VII: One With The Soil.
Arrogant Bastard
The plunge into the black (metal) is oft riddled with cloned sounds, shoebox recording and charcoaled blurry band photos. Visions is a lovely exception of doomy black metal. Having listened to this album for a year, I'm still at a loss, I love this album, but I'm not sure exactly why.
Hello, melancholy my old friend.
Favorite track: Vision V: Starless Nights.
Wurzelwerk
A great mixture of doomy and black metal parts, combined with a powerful voice that sometimes reminds me of Saturnus. I'm glad to have discovered this album and hope for more material!
Favorite track: Vision IV: Illumination.
Art of Propaganda is proud to present Anomalie's highly anticipated third album, Visions. In 2011, Marrok (Harakiri for the Sky, Selbstentleibung) founded Anomalie to combine his favorite elements of emotional black metal, post-metal, and depressive rock, which soon resulted in his own incomparable vision of profound and honest music. Two years later, the work for his first full-length album, Between the Light, came to a conclusion: Anomalie impressed many and received much positive reaction in the press. It was followed in 2015 with the even-more-critically acclaimed Refugium: what was originally nothing more than a one-man side project turned into Marrok's main (and very personal) channel of artistical expression with this second album, which was soon followed by a decision to gather a full live lineup during that year's summer season.
Alas, that solo-turned-secular vision has fully blossomed with Anomalie's third album, appropriately titled Visions. Immediately, the expanded heft of a full lineup is felt on Visions. That positive development is largely the result of the band's time on the road, during two European tours alongside such acts as Dread Sovereign and Agrypnie - but it sounds, and especially feels, totally like the Anomalie the international metal scene has grown to love. Thus armed, the band made the wise decision to record again at the esteemed Klangschmiede Studio E in Germany with producer Markus Stock (Alcest, Secrets of the Moon, Empyrium).
But more than the actual sonics underpinning Visions are the life experiences which inform Anomalie's music. Some major changes in Marrok's ocurred since the release of Refugium, and with the help of this expanded lineup, he guides those experiences toward a natural evolution of the now-characteristic Anomalie aesthetic. An atmospheric spiritual journey telling the story of seven individual visions, the soundscapes of this opus are an amalgamation of black metal's bleakness with breathtaking melodies and fragile acoustic guitar arrangements, abducting the listener into a realm of fire and bones. Some compositions demand a certain level of patience and maturity to experience the full range of this highly emotional voyage, but those who are ready to face Visions will feel the honesty and profundity of these hymns about the cycles of life and death!
The atmosphere grows deeper, the message echoes stronger, and the sound shows more individuality than ever before: truly, Visions will mark a massive new milestone in Anomalie's history.
credits
released March 17, 2017
All music and words by Marrok.
Recorded, mixed and mastered by
Markus Stock at Klangschmiede Studio E, September – Oktober 2016.
Produced by Marrok and Markus Stock.
Guest vocals on „Towards the Sun“by Bartholomäus Resch (Ex-Belphegor)
Guest vocals on „One with the Soil“ by Heike Langhans (Draconian)
Layout & Artwork by Irrwisch
A truly stellar death/doom album with heavy doses of black metal. Tracks like Isolation, Child of Light, and Broken Hymns deliver the sorrowful and icy tone of this album, elevated by the stirring cello compositions of Raphael Weinroth-Browne. The album delivers a deeply satisfying crescendo in Becoming Intangible before stirring the soul once again with Epilogue. Matt Richardson
Crushing blackened doom from this German band that counterbalances blinding fury with moments of surprising, melancholy melody. Bandcamp New & Notable Jul 8, 2023
The eight tracks on the latest from German black metal band pummel and hiss, working occasional atmospheric moments into the din. Bandcamp New & Notable Mar 12, 2022
This whole album is flawless. This is music for walking in the rain and letting your thoughts run. It's not just a collection of songs, but an actual album. yakbone