Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon is a popular parlor game within cineast circles. The goal is to trace back a path from a randomly chosen actor to Kevin Bacon, connecting them to another actor via a film that both actors have appeared in together until the chosen path leads to Kevin Bacon. Ultimately, as entertaining as it is, the game highlights that these connections are tenuous at best and don’t really showcase much about the actors portfolios or their careers at all. The further away you get from Kevin Bacon, the less likely it is that any connection exists at all.
Unlike with an actors Bacon number, Metal genres do not necessarily dilute the further they get away from the source. Metal as a genre has flanderised himself for the last decade and longer and a lot of what is popular right now coasts on some degree of nostalgia. As we move away from the source, artists try to cling to the most hardened of tropes. Meanders by Swiss Tech Death Outfit Anachronism manages to avoid this issue. While I can trace most of the band’s creative choices back to some formative act, they never drift into an outright pastiche. Groovy, percussive guitars recall Gojira or Domination-era Morbid Angel at times, but the emotional content of it is decidedly different. The guitar solos remind of the Post-punkified 80s Prog of King Crimson or the hyperdriven Prog Metal of early Animals as Leaders, but the ultimate goal seems not to impress, but to express. The slimy, angular guitar work of a band like Demilich gets transformed into something that is as much texture as it is riff, something that is as dense as it is gripping. All of it held together by a Post-metal influence that is never overbearing or sacrificing aggression, never giving up actual material in the pursuit of faux-cinematic atmosphere.
That Meanders is a quality record is pretty obvious from the start. Taking and weaving their influences into something cohesive and unique is no small feat. One must only compare Meanders to Mithridatum‘s latest offering, which took the tropes and didn’t have the bravery to either subvert them or make them their own. How good Meanders is is a different question though. It hits me on an emotional level, but I admit that as a musician myself, there is an intellectual bias to an album like this. Either way, Meanders is the album that the metal scene desperately needs more of – the rare act that can possibly bridge the gap between those that believe Metal has gotten stale and those that are afraid it might lose its identity.
