Tag Archives: Music

Music I Love: The Optimist, by Anathema

Album: The Optimist
Artist: Anathema
Year: 2017

Track Listing:

  1. 32.63n 117.14w
  2. Leaving It Behind
  3. Endless Ways
  4. The Optimist
  5. San Francisco
  6. Springfield
  7. Ghosts
  8. Can’t Let Go
  9. Close Your Eyes
  10. Wildfires
  11. Back to the Start

Anathema are an oddity of a band, and I love them for it. From their roots as a doom/death metal outfit in the early 1990s (in fact considered one of the “Peaceville Three” along with Paradise Lost and My Dying Bride, founding the British doom scene at the time), they’ve evolved over the past two and half decades into something much more spiritual and emotive.

Their big turnaround came after a seven-year break between A Natural Disaster (2003) and We’re Here Because We’re Here (2010), when they more or less reinvented themselves – not in terms of sound, but in terms of spirit. Where songs from the former album drag the listener on a journey of panic and despair:

Shadows are forming take heed of the warnings
Creeping around at four in the morning
Lie to myself start a brand new beginning
But I’m losing myself in this fear of living

Pulled Under at 2000 Metres a Second – A Natural Disaster

We’re Here Because We’re Here presents an entirely different shift of perspective:

Needed time to clear my mind
Breathe the free air find some peace there
I used to keep my heart in jail
But the choice was love or fear of pain and
And I chose love

Everything – We’re Here Because We’re Here

This spiritual optimism is carried forward throughout their subsequent albums, Weather Systems and Distant Satellites, and persists on their latest release, The Optimist. The irony here is that The Optimist is a sort of loose concept album based on the cover art for their 2001 effort A Fine Day to Exit – arguably their darkest and most depressing release ever.

Opening with a prelude track (which includes snippets of previous Anathema songs) that sounds like someone dragging themselves back to a car after trying to drown themselves in the ocean, we move seamlessly into the first song, Leaving It Behind, opening with a patter of electronic drumbeats before a dark storm of semi-distorted guitar washes over everything.

Yet not all is so gloomy; tracks such as Endless Ways and the title track are gentler, with soothing piano and soaring melodies, harkening back to the early days of their reinvention with We’re Here Because We’re Here and Weather Systems.

Anathema have settled on a sound that works for them; a distinct blend of acoustic, electric and electronic that is at once familiar and yet instantly identifiable. If there is a criticism to this album compositionally it is that the band relies heavily on ostinato, with endlessly repeating refrains over which the lyrics are sung in duet by both Vincent Cavanagh and Lee Douglas, alternating between Cavanagh’s angsty vocals and Douglas’ soulful melodies.

It’s hard for me to say this is my favorite Anathema album; to me, their best work remains in the past, when they were dark and depressing and matched my mood so well. That being said, this is the sound of a band at their peak maturity, knowing what works for them and running with it. Of their four “new” albums, The Optimist stands out head and shoulders above the others, and for good reason: it truly is an exemplary vision of spiritual indie rock at its best.

What Have I Left Behind?

I watched a movie last night called Carrie Pilby (2016). In essence it’s about a startlingly intelligent girl who is trying to figure out her place in a world of people with half her brains and twice her wisdom. It was a cute movie, with just enough humor and drama to satisfy, without leaving you emotionally exhausted by the end. A little predicatble, perhaps, but entertaining.

And I related to it in more than a few ways, which I found surprising, because I don’t usually relate to onscreen characters. Like me, Carrie skipped grades in school. Like I once did, Carrie thought of her intelligence as something that set her above her peers (I now know that intelligence is a poor measure of a person). Like me, Carrie is sometimes depressed. She can’t relate to people, and finds social interactions exceptionally difficult.

The funny thing was that, as much as I related to the titular character, I also related to one of the side characters, too: Cy. Cy is a talented musician who hides his gifts behind humility, and despite his scruff and snark plays clarinet for one of the leading orchestras in the world. And the thought of Cy playing in an orchestra made me think back to my own youth, and what I’ve left behind.

You see, I was once a talented musician. For many years as a child music was everything, was my life and my reason for existence. I dreamed of playing Rachmaninov before crowds of thousands, and as much as I struggled to play my best, I equally enjoyed playing at my best. I gave concerts; I sang in choirs. It led me to a degree in music composition.

And then, slowly, life got in the way. The last time I put note to paper was over a decade ago. The last time I played a real piano was years ago. And whilst you don’t forget things like that, it makes me start to wonder: what was it all for?

There’s something about the creative process that innately calls to me, something that, without which, leaves me feeling hollow, and empty. There have been great periods of my life when I haven’t created anything at all, and these are unsurpisingly linked to the times of my life when my depression has been at its worst.

In recent years my creativity has come in the form of writing, either novels or blogging, and whilst writing words is arguably a lengthier, more arduous process than writing music, it bears the promise of a more immediate reward: it’s easier to get people to read your writing than to listen to your music.

That being said, I miss writing music. I miss the process of orchestration, of wondering which instruments would sound best where, and creating sounds that, until then, had never existed before. Some of my favorite compositions were for a full orchestra, whilst others were smaller, chamber arrangements; yet others were death metal in symphonic form.

I saw some time ago a post about Anthony Hopkins, and how he once wrote a waltz. for decades it went unheard, until it was finally pulled from the dusty shelves and performed for the very first time. I would love to hear my own music performed live. I would love to know what it sounds like in real life, and not in my head, or through poor computer imitations. And watching this movie returned all these thoughts to me. It made me want to experience live music again, to compose, and to create. And hopefully, I will.

It takes time, and it takes effort. It takes years of laboring in the dark before one sees the light. Sometimes the light never shines. And this thought saddens me more than any other; that what I write, what I create—it will die with me, unheard and unread by any, one of millions of stories the world over that will never see the light of day. That will ever remain on the dusty shelves.

I wonder, sometimes: what have I left behind? What life might I have had as a musician and composer? Would it have been any more fulfilling than that of an unknown writer? Or would I have languished, withered and despaired … much as I still to to this day?

I suppose there is no telling; there is no knowing ‘what if’. Nonetheless, it reminds me of how fleeting we all are, and how important it is to do the best we can each day—even if that best isn’t much. Because one day we’ll all be gone, and what we leave behind is all that will remain to remember us by.

To fight the gloom and dark, and persevere in the face of utter despair. Such is life.

Music I Love: “Crimson”, Sentenced (2000)

I first wrote about this album five years ago here, but I’ve been going through a brief resurgence of depression over the past few days, and there is no album that better summarizes those feelings for me than Crimson, by Finnish goth metal band Sentenced.

Sentenced’s career (now a decade over) started as a fairly traditional death metal band, before growing their singer’s melody from a guttural growl, and for many people their breakthrough album was Amok, released in 1995. Their lyrics have been filled with loathing and depression from the outset, but for me their peak was with 2000’s Crimson. The previous two albums, Down and Frozen have some gems, such as The Suicider, but for me Crimson was the first time that Sentenced truly abandoned their death metal roots entirely for a more pop-goth metal sound, never heard better than on their (Finnish) chart-topping Killing Me Killing You.

This album resonated deeply for me in my youth, for the lyrics seemed to perfectly encompass the bleak despair and misery that I lived through every day:

And yet in some twisted way
I enjoy my misery
And in some strange way
I have grown together with my agony

—Home in Despair, Crimson (2000)

Now, seventeen years later, it brings back powerful memories of darkness and despair, and has ever been the soundtrack to depression throughout my ever-changing mental illnesses. Sentenced deliberately broke up in 2005 after releasing their final album, The Funeral Album, and although both it and 2002’s The Cold White Light were phenomenal monuments of bleak despair, nothing will ever top Crimson for its utter, devastating depression.