Anubis Gate
Covered in Black
Nightmare Records
2017
You know what? You have to show a certain amount of respect to a band like Anubis Gate; they’ve been going on since the early 00s and have kept releasing albums, despite a record company going bust, their vocalist departing and the larger audience not listening, at least not in droves…
Somehow, almost poppy “prog” which happens to have family ties with a popular magazine seems to have become “mega” popular, while these folks, you know, they seem forever condemned to live in the shadows… despite being “good musicians” able to come up with compelling material time and again…
On their seventh album, Anubis Gate will not surprise you, but they seem to be playing on their strengths and to have distilled their long experience in order to create one of their most mature albums to date. Taking both a musical and lyrical darker turn than its predecessor “Horizons”, “Covered in Black” is all about people in “dark” places and circumstances... so it’s quite darker, but without sacrificing its melody. What is also neat, is the fact that the band is able to accumulate whatever genre specific inspirations they have and actually apply the without changing their “sound” a lot in the way say, Adagio did quite recently.
There are several neat tracks one display here, from the somewhat tripped up and creepy “Psycotropia” to the eastern tinged “The New Delhi Assassination”, the elegy of “A Journey to Nowhere”, the trio of “Black”, “Blacker”, “Blackest”, a three part suite that gets deeper into a bit of a psychotic like state. The long winded “Operation Cairo”, which clocks at more than nine minutes again flirts with eastern modes and such, but manages to do so quite neatly… and it was only a few of the other songs that really didn’t quite do it for me, without being bad per se.
These Danes do the old school melodic prog genre justice and should easily have been just as popular as similar bands like Pagan’s Mind etc. but apparently are not. Oh well, still pretty much worth checking the album out if you’re a longtime fan, although I sincerely doubt you’d lose your head over it.
Somehow, almost poppy “prog” which happens to have family ties with a popular magazine seems to have become “mega” popular, while these folks, you know, they seem forever condemned to live in the shadows… despite being “good musicians” able to come up with compelling material time and again…
On their seventh album, Anubis Gate will not surprise you, but they seem to be playing on their strengths and to have distilled their long experience in order to create one of their most mature albums to date. Taking both a musical and lyrical darker turn than its predecessor “Horizons”, “Covered in Black” is all about people in “dark” places and circumstances... so it’s quite darker, but without sacrificing its melody. What is also neat, is the fact that the band is able to accumulate whatever genre specific inspirations they have and actually apply the without changing their “sound” a lot in the way say, Adagio did quite recently.
There are several neat tracks one display here, from the somewhat tripped up and creepy “Psycotropia” to the eastern tinged “The New Delhi Assassination”, the elegy of “A Journey to Nowhere”, the trio of “Black”, “Blacker”, “Blackest”, a three part suite that gets deeper into a bit of a psychotic like state. The long winded “Operation Cairo”, which clocks at more than nine minutes again flirts with eastern modes and such, but manages to do so quite neatly… and it was only a few of the other songs that really didn’t quite do it for me, without being bad per se.
These Danes do the old school melodic prog genre justice and should easily have been just as popular as similar bands like Pagan’s Mind etc. but apparently are not. Oh well, still pretty much worth checking the album out if you’re a longtime fan, although I sincerely doubt you’d lose your head over it.