Anaal Nathrakh Trample London’s Scala

Rok Last updated 30 December 2022

Aaah, December — the month of predictably awful Christmas music blaring from every other speaker, and the month of hyper-consumerism, all while the world crumbles right before our eyes. I couldn’t have imagined a more fitting time to catch the first Anaal Nathrakh show in nearly four years, and Mythology, as the concert’s promoters, clearly knew it too. The duo of Dave Hunt a.k.a. V.I.T.R.I.O.L. and Mick Kenney a.k.a. Irrumator recorded, just over two years ago, if not the best then certainly the most ear-friendly (as strange as that sounds) Anaal Nathrakh album, Endarkenment — and then it happened… We all know what, and the record was left to spin in music players and sit on best-metal-albums-of-2020 lists. The future of Anaal Nathrakh seemed murky and unresolved. Then, seemingly out of nowhere, news broke a few months back that Mick Kenney could no longer contribute to Anaal Nathrakh, and that Dave Hunt had assembled a lineup of musicians from Akercocke and Voices for what might be the band’s very last show. On December 14th, the Scala — located in the part of London known as King’s Cross (famous mainly for its gorgeous hotel and the train station that also houses the well-known Platform 9¾ from Harry Potter) — hosted a show that I can easily, after an enormous number of gigs attended, say belongs among the three best I have ever seen.

After a long queue that snaked outside the venue in proper British fashion (and was, in equally proper British fashion, ushered inside just as swiftly), the locals, death metallers De Profundis, took the stage as the first act right on schedule. They released their sixth studio album, The Corruption of Virtue, this past October, and understandably gave it most of the spotlight. The already nicely filled venue, which holds around five hundred souls, they greeted with Martyrs from previous album The Blinding Light of Faith, before making their new-album case with Ritual Cannibalism, demonstrating exactly why the new record is finally earning them some well-deserved attention. In a solid half-hour set, De Profundis rolled through the Scala like a wrecking ball with high-octane death metal that cleverly blends American and Swedish influences, spiced up with more complex, technically demanding elements. Beyond brute force, De Profundis are distinguished by virtuosic guitar solos in the vein of the great Death or their kindred spirits Mithras, and even more so by a prominent, clearly audible, wonderfully varied and dynamic bass whose lines and tone Death or Obscura wouldn’t be ashamed of. For their solid performance, the five-piece earned a well-deserved response and bid farewell to the predominantly English crowd (with a handful of Slovenians and even one Japanese person, plus a few other out-of-towners hungry for some December Anaal Nathrakh chaos) with the tectonic War Be Upon Him. Compared to what came next, nothing extraordinary in the grand scheme of things — but De Profundis thoroughly warmed up an increasingly packed crowd.

Japanese oddballs Sigh, like De Profundis, also released a new studio album this summer — their twelfth already, not counting a heap of EPs and splits — Shiki, and greeted London after many years with the sludge-heavy riffs of its nearly eight-minute opening track Kuroi Kage. Sigh are notoriously hard to catch on European stages, which makes their shows something of a rare treat, and their London appearance was no exception — it was their first show on UK soil in well over a decade. The legendary band (known primarily for the fact that their cult debut Scorn Defeat was released by Euronymous himself on his Deathlike Silence label, making it the only non-European album on the roster) we did catch a few years back at the Czech Brutal Assault, where they impressed and left a very strong impression with their avant-garde and experimental take on black metal. Back then there was a whole crowd of them on stage, and they dazzled mainly with live saxophone and a host of other ethnic instruments, so something similar was expected this time around. But Sigh took the stage this time with a heavily stripped-down lineup — band leader Mirai Kawashima was accompanied only by Junichi Harashima (drums) and new guitarist Nozomu Wakai (guitar). Mirai had, unfortunately, left his charismatic wife Dr. Mikannibal — who normally handles vocals and saxophone — at home this time, and overall Sigh came across as somewhat lukewarm. In just under an hour, the trio did deliver a solid cross-section of their long career, touching on not only the new album but also the cult black metal debut Scorn Defeat, the equally cult Hail Horror Hail with its title track, and the amped-up hit The Transfiguration Fear (from In Somniphobia) with its infectious chorus (“Into darkness you’re falling/Into (the) fire/The end of torment I’m calling/See the world, it’s to disappear”). Naturally, Sigh wouldn’t be Sigh without some theatrics, which this time came courtesy of Nozomu “cutting” his arms with a katana and Mirai reading from a burning bible, plus the general showmanship of Nozomu and Junichi, who looked like they’d be more at home in a Van Halen than a black metal band. Despite a show that didn’t quite live up to expectations in full, Sigh closed by confidently reminding the London crowd that black metal didn’t start in Norway but in England, and of course ripped into the Venom classic Black Metal — though Nozomu’s guitar unceremoniously died on him and only came back to life in time for the very last riff.

Let’s get one thing straight about the Anaal Nathrakh show right from the start. Remember that iconic exploding-head scene from Cronenberg’s splatter-fest Scanners? Or the Monty Python Mr. Creosote sketch and that wafer-thin mint? Or footage of nuclear explosions? That is exactly what the Anaal Nathrakh show at a sold-out London Scala was like, and that is exactly the effect it had on the ears and every other sense of everyone packed into that hall. In this new incarnation, Dave Hunt had assembled Dan Abela (bass; Voices), David Gray (drums; Akercocke, Voices), Sam Loynes (guitar; Akercocke) (and one more guitarist whose name unfortunately escaped me), and referred to the new lineup simply as an “experiment” whose future remains (as yet) unclear. And holy hell, what an experiment it was! That something truly massive and chaotic was coming was already telegraphed by the Acheronta Movebimus intro, its slowly building atmosphere matched by rising tension in the room. That tension exploded when Hunt charged onto the stage like a boxer entering the ring and launched the band into a furious Unleash, and the entire lineup, despite some minor early hiccups, proved this was no experiment at all — this was a band that looked and sounded like it had been playing together for years. Hunt’s sheer presence had the venue in ecstatic, tornado-like motion almost instantly — the pit was relentless with moshing and crowd-surfing, and a massive wall of death was inevitable. Although he warned upfront that there would be no sentimentality or being “touchy feely” — which, of course, would hardly suit a band that lays bare humanity’s darkest sides — Hunt was nonetheless visibly surprised and genuinely happy with the crowd’s response, thanking them with “cheers” throughout, and still managed to give a glimmer of hope that Anaal Nathrakh haven’t said their final word just yet. Hunt also explained Kenney’s absence — he moved to the USA during the pandemic and is now so swamped with production work that he can barely leave the house — then charged ahead into a full blitzkrieg of their unique blend of black metal chaos, industrial pounding, and death/grind brutality, backed by outstanding vocal performances with Hunt leading the charge and Abela and Loynes providing solid, commanding support. The setlist needs no defense — the guys delivered a gorgeous cross-section of the discography where picking favorites is nearly impossible. But the inhuman screams tearing into the London night on Bellum Omnium Contra Omnes (which encapsulates Thomas Hobbes’s philosophy of the natural state of society as a “war of all against all”) were unforgettable, as were Between Shit and Piss We Are Born, the rawest-sounding track of the night Submission Is for the Weak from the Mayhem-esque debut The Codex Necro, the WWI anti-war epic Forward!, and the live debut of Libidinous (A Pig With Cocks in Its Eyes) with its Halford-esque howled chorus, plus the title track from the current album, Endarkenment. God, it’s genuinely hard to put into words what Anaal Nathrakh conjured up in London, and the only downside of the whole show was that it ended too soon — the guys don’t mess around with encores, they just trample the crowd without pause, as they did this time too, closing with the epic Forging Towards the Sunset and the final Do Not Speak, which Hunt introduced with the famous Orwell quote from 1984: “If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face – for ever.” And that’s exactly what Anaal Nathrakh did to us with their unforgettable performance that night — stomped us into pulp.

Based on everything I saw and heard, I genuinely hope this wasn’t the band’s swan song — and given the crowd’s response, and Hunt’s reaction to it, I have my doubts that it was. At the same time, Anaal Nathrakh is a band we simply need in the time and place we inhabit — as a reminder of humanity’s rot, whether in social relations, our relationship with nature, (geo)political dynamics, or ultimately just plain human, interpersonal ones. You know what Nietzsche said: “If you gaze long into the abyss, the abyss gazes back into you.” And what exactly lies in that abyss — well, Anaal Nathrakh know it better than anyone.

Photos: Nina Grad

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