Sunday, June 08, 2014

Anathema - Distant Satellites (A small Review)

If you have not heard this album yet then stop what you are doing RIGHT NOW, pull up a chair and sit, and enjoy what is rapidly becoming not just one of my albums of 2014, but one of the finest albums by one of the finest bands you've probably never heard of.

Anathema hail from Liverpool and began life as a Doom/Death metal band in the early 1990s.  Following a bit of a shuffling of personel, the band has settled down around the Cavanaugh brothers - Vincent (vocals/guitar), Danny (guiar/vocals) and Jaimie (bass.)

All that remains of that era of the band's music is channelled into the most fragile, emotional and human music I have ever heard. Period. It is truly progressive, because the bands music has changed and grown.  Perhaps better put, it has evolved over the years. The band recently described how the music they make seems to come from somewhere else and they do the best to get out of the way. And thank goodness that they do!

I joined the party late, only discovering the band with their latter two relaeases 'We're Here Because We're Here' and 'Weather Systems' rapidly finding a place in my heart. But with 'Distant Satellites' the band have continued to chart both lyrically and musically the breadth of human emotion and experience, but with this release, take them and us to the beating heart of what it means to be human, bounded in time and space, having only one go at life in the now.

What the listener is invited into is a poetry of secular spirituality that is simultaneously transcendent and immanent, both enduring (maybe even eternal) and fleeting. It has captured my soul - I hope it does yours.

The album is released on June 9th on Kscope and I would say is an essential purchase and a worthy addition to any music collection.


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