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7.0
- Bands:
ANCST - Duration: 00:34:29
- Available from: 03/05/2024
- Label:
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Lifeforce Records
Streaming not yet available
Always very prolific, as well as eager to regularly test themselves with new collaborations and experiments, with the new “Culture of Brutality” ANCST try to create a work that stands out within their discography for its ferocity and essentiality. Over the years, we have seen the German group attempt various paths, starting from a crust hardcore tinged with black metal to arrive at drone/dark ambient parentheses, complete immersions in the blackest metal and even some recourse to a catchier metal-based hybrid and hardcore.
With the new album, the Berlin band reaches new heights of intensity and anger, with extremely concise songs (twenty of them), which explode with a primitive fury, maintaining a metallic casing – which refers to the metalcore and black metal experiences – and evoking at the same time the punk roots in spirit and approach.
As always happens with ANCST’s releases, “Culture of Brutality” is a sonic journey that is not limited to entertaining, but also invites reflection: once again, in fact, the lyrics address themes of social oppression, alienation and inequality, creating a picture of a society destroying itself through its own ignorance.
On a musical level, one of the distinctive characteristics of the new proposal is the ability to mix different styles without compromising too much the coherence of the album: those familiar with the group’s repertoire will recognize – under the umbrella represented by the heartfelt screaming of the leader Tom Schmidt – all the typical ingredients of its offer, channeled into particularly sober structures, in which everything possible has been done to highlight the urgency and renewed instinctive nature that animate the project. At times you almost have the impression of having the old Heaven Shall Burn in front of you grappling with grindcore formulas, even if, all things considered, the references are many and fleeting, precisely because the group on this occasion rarely gives itself the time to fully explore a single theme. Indeed, at some moments the enthusiasm is so great that it gives the listener the idea of being in the presence of a draft to be finished rather than a real song – see “Of Rusty Knives”, whose midtempo break fades right into the more beautiful.
While recognizing the undeniable pleasure of listening to “Culture of Brutality”, one cannot help but notice how the Germans’ latest chapter sometimes lacks a sense of finiteness or some extra hint of personality. The band probably deliberately opted for this cruder and more destabilizing cut than usual, so as to underline, in these darker times than ever, how their music also and above all acts as a vehicle to express indignation and dissent towards a system that perpetuates various forms of violence and marginalization. Having said that, there is no shortage of very successful songs (“Armed with Despise”, “Destination Nowhere”, “Vitreous Conformity”, “Edge of Reason”), so those who have always appreciated the efforts of the Teutonic collective will almost certainly find this time too more than one item of interest.
