Sometimes an album grabs your interest on the first listen, and sometimes it takes a little longer to grow on you if there are aspects that you don’t quite enjoy first time round. After not really connecting with Non-Euclidean Spaces whilst hearing it for the first time, I hoped that the new album from Anthropia would fall into the latter of the two categories, but unfortunately it just doesn’t quite manage to go the distance.
It’s a shame because the instrumentation is really good. Unknown Kadath – an entirely instrumental track – is a mini-epic of a song and it feels almost like a film score, like Anthropia are taking you on some sort of adventure and it sounds like it could set the scene for a big Hollywood blockbuster. Similarly Fuoco, another instrumental number, is a wildly energetic number packed up with so much momentum it’s practically bursting at the seams!
However, the vocals really let the album down. The male and female vocals don’t quite gel together as well as they could, and there are points where it really does feel like they’re being forced out, which isn’t a good sound, and after a while it just gets so grating that it ruins your enjoyment. It’s disappointing, to say the least, because there’s a lot of potential to be found within the piece.
As a whole, Non-Euclidean Spaces feels like it can be so much more. With a little more thought to the vocal melodies and harmonising, this could be something special.
5/10
