Even though I did get to see Anodyne play live a couple of times, including one absolutely pulverizing set in the basement at CBGBs back in 2001, I didn't
really get into these guys and start picking up their albums and EPs until well after the band decided to throw in the towel. All of their releases reveal a
punishing riffbeast who delivered some of the most creative and textural music to come out of the metal/hardcore scene, a massive dirgey heaviosity that was
as schooled in brutal post-Am Rep/noise rock and Black Flag's discography as it was in the cacophonous sheet-metal aggression of NYC pigfuck and Swans and the apocalyptic tribal sludge of Neurosis. Anodyne consumed all of those influences and distilled them into brutal, often experimental and improvisational slabs of endtime metalcore that ranks as some of the most pissed off, apocalyptic sounding metal I've ever heard. I'm working on getting everything that they released (that's still in print) in stock here at Crucial Blast since there's some interest in Anodyne thanks to the big buzz that Mike Hill's new band Tombs has been generating...
1999's The Outer Dark is little more than an elongated EP, with seven songs coming in at just over twenty-one minutes, but this disc is still a
punishing entry in Anodyne's catalog that would probably have lost some of it's impact if the band had made it any longer. It was the band's first album, paired with those creepy Gustav Dore engravings, and it featured guitarist Ayal Naor from post-rockers 27 in the lineup. While Quiet Wars doesn't have any real industrial elements like those that would appear on later releases, this is still a devestating dose of complex, metallic noise-rock that sounds like the final scream of rage at the dying of the world. The disc opens with "Sometimes No Means Right", aggressive tribal drums and sheets of dissonant guitar and eerie atonal leads met with jagged Deadguy-esque metallic hardcore, and then on to the feral assault of "Coriolis Acceleration", which combines Neurosis dirge and angular metallic noise rock into that signature Andoyne sound. "The Great Assimilator" starts off with a sludgy thrash metal riff that turns into dissonant shredding over crushing quasi-industrial drumming, then veers into a surprisingly languid bit of psychedelic slowcore that again hints at that Neurosis sound, then veers off again, this time into another crushing angular noise rock jam. "Cities Of The Plain" features more repetitive, chunky noise rock riffing and atonal melodies, but the last three minutes turn into sparse glacial drums over pure molten ambient guitar noise and spacey effects, a grim stretch of dark abstract ambience that hints at some of the more aggressively droneological experiments that Anodyne would engage in later.
"Untermyer Park" achives near grindcore speeds at first, and then drops into a massive chugging dirge that effectively channels the atavistic pound of early
Swans through minimal doomy guitars and pounding slow-motion drums, and then "The Extremist" ends the album with a ferociously thrashing number mixed up with crushing dissonant noise rock complete with drum solo (!) and drifting out in a factory fog of spaced-out guitar noise.
Even though Anodyne never achieved the popularity of their peers in Botch, Isis, and Coalesce, these guys were just as crucial in the development of what a lot of folks like to call "post-metal" (please, shoot me in the face with a nailgun if you ever catch me using that term...), playing a brand of crushing, complex and sometimes difficult sound that was all their own, and all of their albums are essential listens within the spectrum of forward-thinking metallic heaviness.