Grim music is the path to dark side. Grim leads to necro. Necro leads to evil. Evil leads to The Whole of the Law. The Whole of the Law is Anaal Nathrakh’s ninth studio album and it’s a violent sonic explosion of beat pounding riffs complete with hosannas in extremis.
Anaal Nathrakh have always captivated their audience with a blistering aural assault and this album isn’t any different. Offering up thirteen tracks (of which two are covers) that inspire more heinous emotions than anything the Septic Tanks can currently dream up, this album is beyond artistic warfare.
There are somethings that go without saying and telling someone that this album is brutal would be like telling them that a Vindaloo is spicy. It’s the second largest sonic grenade that I’ve ever heard!
It is without a doubt the darkest piece of blackened metal to break off the old metal tree this autumn. It’s heaviness can be attributed to a few factors, with the simplest being that it’s Anaal Fucking Nathrakh, the other reasons are however more metal.
Following in style from 2014’s Desideratum the Brummies are once again incorporating more from the grinding latitudes of brutal sounding electronics into their signature black core. Punching harder than ever but not forgetting their vile roots. In essence fucking over more melodic black metal than the crust punks ever have.
However that’s not to say that the songs are devoid of euphonious merit because, although the album is super-charged with atomic bursts of nuclear fission, the attention to form invokes a grander design. Where the purity of musical extremes conjures entrancing rhythms that pervade through the sonal tides of the licks and verses that offer adversity to the maddening noise coming from the exceptionally harsh riffs.
The Whole of the Law might just be the conclusion to a brutal experiment but with Anaal Nathrakh’s proven techniques and their sharp tones it should be considered exhibit A in the case of the missing balls in black metal. Having wrenched them off for a serious game of table tennis with industrial. This album is criminally insane, and that is to say genius.
10/10
