Artist: Atlach-Nacha
Title: Manifestations
Type: Album
Label: Digital
This little demo from new Finnish project from the mysterious S seems to have garnered a little attention, from myself included as it weirdly and randomly popped up on my feed. So as often is the case I went off to investigate and…
Yeah. I can see why.
So this is under twenty minutes long and oddly rather difficult to review in some ways. I often get the feeling that I’m finding things in music that perhaps I shouldn’t, that I can’t justify but then I shrug and remind myself that it is my perspective that matters if I’m reviewing something and that, by the nature of art, is subjective. And in my opinion, if it matters, this is a fascinating debut.
The sound of Atlach-Nacha announces itself with the first note on ‘Hopeless Prayers’; this is lo-fi, hugely distorted blurring, fuzzed out black metal riffs, vocals buried deep in the mire a la Black Cilice (a compliment of the highest order) but then the strange, eerie and clear notes of a piano adding a bitter melody to the song. The pace is sombre, the sound vibrating wildly as it flaps round the borders of distortion into noise. But it hits. It hits home deeply and hard. Depressive, grim but like a house flickering in and out of reality. And the riffs are captivating too.
I mean I love raw, low-fi stuff for the visceral, unfiltered emotion it can convey and the atmosphere here is just…. gripping.
‘Cries Of Ancient Paganism’ has a more rhythmic approach but no less deep in the freying distorted landscape. It has a melancholy tone, a real sense of loss. The sudden stop and start of the guitar is amplified by the distortion, the vocals echo down centuries like a wandering, howling spirit. We get the piano once more, a plaintive sound. Combined with the sudden, half a breath stop of the guitar sound it is gorgeous. A strange, drum based section haunts a ritual space, keyboards slicing through notes with almost a shriek but somehow softer… It’s strange, and that just makes it all the more immersive.
‘Anger’ is a short burst of maniacal drum and guitar and scream. ‘I’m Forgetting My Childhood’ is initally a time ravaged recording of some nursery lullaby, simple piano, delicate notes surrounded by hiss and noise until the scream rips that childhood memory to pieces and it ends, stuttering broken and lost.
The demo closes with ‘A Moment Of Silence’, just the needle stuck at the end of the record, endlessly circling. Nothing more. Until it ceases.
Short. Strange. Beautifully conceived. Haunting and in places quite, quite wrong somehow.
I genuinely look forward to seeing where this is going to go as at the moment this disotrtion fuelled world is a space inside an anomaly that has completely pulled me in.
Gizmo
Walking The Liminal Space 