Author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Venue: Boogaloo / Zagreb / Croatia
Concert date: November 15, 2010
Attendance: 450
Ticket price: 160.00 HRK
Anathema have oiled up the machine again and hit the road. The album “We’re Here Because We’re Here” brought the band back to Croatia after a six-year gap in live shows. Their second time in Zagreb. The buzz before the gig was huge. People said the guys would play a full three hours, with a setlist of thirty songs. Those rumors weren’t far off from what we had the honor of witnessing this time at Boogaloo.
At 8:30 p.m. Petter Carlsen, a young Norwegian indie rocker, walked onto the stage. The kid turned out to be a more than fitting choice of opener. He has a great angelic voice, clean and clear. Perfectly suited to coloring the melancholic, melodic collages that fill his original music. If any one song crawled under your skin, it was undoubtedly The Sound Of You And Me. Half an hour of yearning melancholy and light but deep-cutting impulses. Toward the end, “Anathema-man” Danny Cavanagh joined the up-and-coming youngster on stage, followed by the other two Cavanaghs, Vincent and Jamie, which left the crowd anything but indifferent. A shy man with a bleeding heart… A surprising appetizer that hinted something of anthological proportions was about to go down at Boogaloo. In short, a great way to stoke the fire.
The Ocean, those excellent German experimental, dare I say post-metal guys who took over the stage for the next half hour, were pure bliss for fans of ambient music. Five silhouettes, darkness, darkness everywhere. But a distinct roar through the solid riffs, which combined with Loic Rossetti’s guttural vocals to create a unique effect and musical experience, could not cool down the people in the room. The Ocean are in the form of their lives. The band has found a tremendous creative spark and released two separate studio albums in this year alone. “Heliocentric” came out back in spring, and by the time of the Zagreb Boogaloo visit its follow-up “Anthropocentric” was out too. Even with the new studio album in their pocket, the band’s excitement about “Heliocentric” hasn’t worn off, so they dedicated most of the set to that record. In between they slipped in the “Precambrian” track “Ectasian: De Profundis”, which meshed perfectly with the newer material. Dark, but there’s so much darkness in that gloom that beauty shines out of it. Simple as that. A band that all you “bold and fearless” fans of experimental sounds simply have to try. Hard to find comparisons, though every now and then a little “doom” spark hisses out of The Ocean too.
It’s around eleven at night. Everything is ready for Anathema to appear on stage. At first, a quintet of men. Anathema take us on a historic epic through a cross-section of their discography, which as expected skipped the first two records (the band’s change of genre was just too drastic to make playing material from those first two make any sense). The band kicks off right with the album “Judgement”. Deep. Gorgeous. Then Pitiless. Even better. And then Forgotten Hopes. Are the guys really going to play the whole of “Judgement” live? It didn’t go quite that far, though they had the crowd on their feet in an instant.
With their new style, the band has also won over a much younger audience, the kind that keeps up with the current alternative rock that even MTV doesn’t miss (Radiohead, Muse, …). So it was no surprise to see a bunch of “chicks” and young girls squeezed into the front rows, swaying flirtatiously under the hypnotic spell of Anathema’s sad songs. After Destiny Is Dead, Anathema take us to the second-to-last album, “A Natural Disaster”, and singer Lee Douglas joins on stage, so the lineup is finally complete. Intensity, great mood, cohesion, a grandiose atmosphere, the stage lit only by little “blinkers” that barely sketch the faces on stage. Anathema drift around like ghosts, but the music speaks for itself. The first part, the opening act if you will, wraps up in a swelling atmosphere that boils over magnificently in A Natural Disaster.
The central part of the concert follows. The biggest challenge for Anathema, and surely the most attractive part for their fans, one they won’t forget to the end of their days. The entire new album “We’re Here Because We’re Here”. An album that took seven years to make. In that time Anathema changed the working title a few times, not to mention how the arrangements went through several rounds of reworking and upgrades. But the album is outstanding. Polished, and it found room for songs that are the very definition of perfection. Above all, songs like Dreaming Night or Thin Air stir up the enchanted crowd too, a crowd that spends a good chunk of the show swaying or staring motionlessly at some imaginary point far off in front of them. The whole album, rounded off by Hindsight, confirmed the band’s incredible tightness and chemistry. The magic of female vocals blending with male ones, flowing collages of organic sounds, subtle, short, unpretentious tricks, full of ease, in search of the most flexible spring to launch the perfect transcendental moment. The point where ethereality and mental disconnect shake hands.
The third part of the evening was dedicated once more to a mix of older songs. Two hours vanished in an instant when the band left the stage. Two encores followed, and to close, the guys “smashed out” the Pink Floyd classic Comfortably Numb, where newly minted short-hair Danny showed he can nail the sound of the famous Gilmour (though that doesn’t apply to the second solo in the final “crescendo”, of course). Oh well. We can say that Anathema, who were once known for covering the Iron Maiden classic Phantom Of The Opera, can’t quite be as “Comfortably” numb as the ultimate Pink Floyd, but they still handled it brilliantly. The pitiful “covers” of this song that Staind or even Dream Theater took on can’t compare to this truly splendid rendition, which gets its special stamp from the vocal approach of singer Vincent Cavanagh. Since we already mentioned Iron Maiden, on last year’s tour Anathema were still playing an acoustic version of Wasted Years.
An extraordinary finish to an extraordinary show, tailor-made for every fan of these masters of atmospheric music, backed by a highly effective hypnotic grip that grabs you firmly and doesn’t let go of the swaying for a full two and a half hours. Anyone who missed this concert and loves Anathema missed out big time. The question is whether such an opportunity will ever come up again. Anathema don’t exactly play every day, especially not in this corner of Europe. The magical night almost matched the running time of the marathon Guns N’ Roses show at the Arena in Zagreb at the end of this September. An unforgettable experience.
photos: Martin Prezelj
Setlist
THE OCEAN: 1. Shamayim 2. Firmament 3. The First Commandment Of The Luminaries 5. Ectasian: De Profundis 6. The Origin Of Species 7. The Origin Of God ANATHEMA: 1. Deep 2. Pitiless 3. Forgotten Hopes 4. Destiny Is Dead 5. Balance 6. Closer 7. A Natural Disaster “We’re Here Because We’re Here” (full album) 8. Thin Air 9. Summernight Horizon 10. Dreaming Light 11. Everything 12. Angels Walk Among Us 13. Presence 14. A Simple Mistake 15. Get Off, Get Out 16. Universal 17. Hindsight 18. Angelica 19. Empty 20. Lost Control 21. Judgement 22. Panic 23. One Last Goodbye — Encore I.— 24. Are You There? 25. Parisienne Moonlight 26. Fragile Dreams — Encore II. — 27. Comfortably Numb
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