AN

AN - Revelation I - World Minus Population
Plague Productions, 2005
Genre: Black Metal

1. Solution...
2. World Minus Population
3. Hammered
4. Let there Be Ebola Frost
5. Human Compost
6. ... Suicide

I picked up AN when I was desperately searching for new music.  I seem to go through stints like that, where you just want to find that one random awesome band, but it’s so hard to do buying albums at random.  AN was not this band.  I had high hopes from this, they had a really cool album title and I was getting into the Finnish Black Metal scene as of late, but AN just didn’t live up to it.  Even if I had had low expectations for this release they still wouldn’t have hit them… and no the music isn’t that horrid as I appear to be making it sound.

Judging by the title I was sort of expecting some insanely violent Black Metal, needless to say this isn’t what I got.  The album actually started off fairly promising with an intro track that sounds like it could have been a superb build up for a ferocious “World Minus Population.”  The intro track ended… then it just fizzled out.  The title track just sort of existed and never built into anything good.  I think the vocals sounded way too out of place for me.  The music was fairly lackluster and this could have sounded better with more intense vocals because at least they could have driven the song, but the vocals hang on the lower range where they don’t quite get into the realm of Death Metal.  The song “Hammered” showed a little more promise and had some fairly cool Black Metal riffing, but one of the riffs made it sound like they really wanted to have some Death Metal elements in there for good measure.  Also throughout this album thus far is some bizarre “ambient” sound effect in the background.  I’m not sure if this is supposed to create atmosphere or dupe the listener into thinking this album has some sort of continuity, but it’s more distracting than anything else.  I would say they were trying to get into the Ambient Black Metal field, but if that was their way of doing it, it didn’t work.  I’m not going to go over each track; you know where I’m going at this point.

By far the worst part of this album is the lyrical content.  There aren’t too many more bands out there that lack this kind of substance… well maybe Von, their lyrics were really nothing.  Seriously when I come across lines like this “I’m captain Bulldozer.  I’ll bury you into my shallow compost.”  I have to stop taking a band seriously.  I mean come on… “hacked, smashed, he does it anyway you want it, fuckface.”  This is just stupid.  I mean realistically this music wouldn’t be so bad if the vocals were better and they had real lyrics.

This seriously could have been a lot better if they had changed at least those two things.  Granted I didn’t find the music overly compelling, but it had its moments here and there.  Unfortunately the album just didn’t hold together for me, and then when I got to the lyrics it just absolutely died.