NUCLEUS

After such a stunning debut album, Anekdoten was certainly looking to expand on their previous . and with Nucleus, the group certainly takes a bold and daring bet, delving in sombre violence, erasing much of the debut's quiet melancholy. Right from the gloomy and menacing eyeball staring at us, we are uneased and pushed by an evident discomfort, as the industrial desert landscapes of the booklet (coupled with the doomed music) are not given us a moment of respite, taking us to the depths unsuspected of their lunacy. Whatever natural elements presented in the artwork seems to have mutated after having survived a nuclear blast, even the pretty butterfly looks menacing and the mushrooms poisonous or radioactive. One of the characteristics of this album is Anna-Sofi's rarer use of the cello (compared with the debut) and she spends much time on the most menacing and oppressive mellotron layers, whiler Nicklas Berg handles a bunch of keyboards.. There is much less overt soloing on this album as well, the group being content on a superb tightness.

Starting off with the atrociously-torn and twisted climates of the title track and its follow-up Harvest is anything but pastoral, plastered with violence, spewing from every pore of the your speakers. Then comes the lengthy Book Of Hours where the violence segues into a slow angst that crescendoes slowly (the first movement Pendulum Swing) to reach havoc with a restrained anger (the second movement The Book, the mellotron-laden finale). The short Raft and Rhubank (both instrumentals) allows you to rest and recuperate while keeping the oppressive climate on the full blast position. In the later Anna-Sofi graces us with a nice cello solo. We find again the cello (but in a drone lower layer) in Here, which is the album second highlight, where Nordhin's drums are distilling a bit of finesse in this brutal planet. The closing chords of here are ringing the end of the lull, as This Far From The Sky tears whatever's left of your eardrums and mess them up with an alternation of ultra-violent riffs and unsettlingly quiet interludes, Liljeström's singing imperturbably over both. The last track In Freedom is a bit over an anti-climax and not the best suited to close this album, IMHO.

This sophomore album is one of the most desperate I've been given to hear outside the Zeuhl-RIO realm, and many of the industrial-screaming-tearing-ripping-twisting climates are quite unnerving. To save this album being labelled neurotic and depressive, it is a good thing that the album's two longer tracks are the most accessible, but this album is not to be listened when feeling depressing: it could lead to drastic acts. The album's feeling was strongly reinforced by the first concert of theirs that I saw, organised by a friend in a Brussels dive/ruin called Le Sud with Finnegans Wake's Henry Krutzen came to play the sax on a few tracks including some Crimson covers.