Band:	Anaal Nathrakh
Album:	Endarkenment
Style:	Black metal, Grindcore
Release date:	October 02, 2020
A review by:	nikarg

01. Endarkenment
02. Thus, Always, To Tyrants
03. The Age Of Starlight Ends
04. Libidinous (A Pig With Cocks In Its Eyes)
05. Beyond Words
06. Feeding The Death Machine
07. Create Art, Though The World May Perish
08. Singularity
09. Punish Them
10. Requiem

I'll give it to you in one sentence; Endarkenment is extreme metal extravaganza, an uptempo soundtrack to the end of the world and album of the year material. Continue reading if you want to know why.

So Anaal Nathrakh have turned soft. I am sure many people thought exactly that when they finished listening to Endarkenment. But us metallers are somewhat desensitized towards brutality and we often have a very distorted view of what 'soft' really means. The vast majority of the 'normal' population out there would have blood coming out of their ears after having to endure only ten seconds of the Brummies' latest album. However, for a band that has pushed metal to its most extreme boundaries, this is indeed their easiest on the ears album so far. On the other hand, Anaal Nathrakh were never extreme just for the sake of extremity anyway. There has always been so much creativity, innovation and inspiration present in their works that it is a real shame that most people will never have the tolerance to experience them. Not even now, when they are at their most accessible.

Endarkenment is more akin to the sound of The Whole Of The Law than to the more 'industrialized' A New Kind Of Horror. But it is not more of the same ol', same ol'. As another big fan of the band in the Metal Storm Towers has put it, "they seem to have sifted through their previous albums, kept only the good parts and turned them into something awesome". The core of the sound is... well... -core. Grindcore, deathcore, metalcore... take your pick. But this -core is adorned with surprisingly chunky bits of very melodic black and death metal, and this record alone contains more delicious and memorable bits than many bands' entire careers do. I am personally in awe of how this duo has placed so much catchiness on top of all the blastbeating, and of how after just one listen there are so many parts of songs stuck in my head despite all the chaos. The contrast is captivating and the songs' addictiveness is very much owed to them having incredibly efficient choruses; just check out the title track, "The Age Of Starlight Ends", "Libidinous (A Pig With Cocks In Its Eyes)", "Feeding The Death Machine", and "Create Art, Though The World May Perish". But I really don't want to single out any tracks, this album is an insane banger from start to finish.

Individual performances? I'm sure you already know that Dave Hunt is one of the more versatile vocalists in metal. Between the screaming, the growling, the howling, the shrieking, the snarling, the wailing, and the squealing, it feels that with every line of lyrics he sings he tears a vocal cord. Which makes it all the more mindnumbingly unbelievable that he actually still has a voice to speak, let alone produce his operatic singing and his King Diamond-esque falsettos. And I cannot imagine any other voice complementing Mick Kenney's sonic weapons of mass destruction, this unique blend of blackened melodic grindcore that no other band can emulate.

I have always found Anaal Nathrakh to be a very difficult band to describe. In my opinion, metal was born in UK's West Midlands with Black Sabbath and its boundaries were pushed to the utmost extreme in the same area, first by Napalm Death and later by Anaal Nathrakh. The latter introduced a sound so unconventional and ever-changing between albums and songs, showcasing an impressive ability of speeding up or slowing down the tempo and of switching effortlessly from genre to genre while still maintaining cohesion. They have always been extreme and they still are but in recent years they have been incorporating more and more darkly regal melodies that have added extra beauty to the hellfire. And it is not just the general sound of Anaal Nathrakh that feels more approachable lately but also the songs they choose to end their albums with. It happened on Vanitas with "A Metaphor For The Dead" and on The Whole Of The Law with "Of Horror, And The Black Shawls", and now Endarkenment comes to a close in the most compellingly melodic and melancholic manner. The stunning outro of "Requiem" has a mellow effect that feels calming and even heart-warming when it comes after all the preceding wonderfully horrific extremity. As if the end of the world is more of a relief rather than a catastrophe.

Many of you must have heard the long-standing rumour that male pigs can orgasm for 30 minutes. I knew you'd be curious so I got the facts. In this study of 'high performance boars', the average duration of ejaculation was around 6 minutes, albeit with considerable variation since one male apparently was yielding semen continuously for 31 minutes. Pretty impressive but not good enough. Why?

Because the Endarkenment pig with the cocks coming out of its eye sockets ejaculates for a whopping total of 41 minutes. On your face.

"A pig with cocks in its eyes
Masturbating to the end of our world"