Also available on colored vinyl.

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...

By the time of 2001's The Outer Dark, Anodyne had been pared down to a three-piece, but this seems to have simply allowed their music to become that much more compact and concise in it's punishing, singleminded drive to batter the listener with their intense and misanthropic metallic noise rock (or noise-rock infected metal, or whatever...). The band was also continuing to experiment more with abstract noise and other sounds, and The Outer Dark resulted in the band's most claustrophobic and dystopian release to date. The album (which once again refuses to breach the twenty-five minute mark) opens with the vicious Black Flag-meets-black metal fury of "Lucky Sky Diamond", with the band's trademark eerie dissonance winding around blasts of raging speed. A twitchier, more angular malevolence manifests in "FOrm Is Emptiness", which slows down at the end as it's boiled down to an insanely heavy dirge. That Neurosis-meets-Unsane sound that Anodyne perfected is featured in "The Tenderness Of Wolves", but at the end changes into another one of their chilling dronescapes. Angular thrash metal makes up most of "Knives" up to the point where the band erupts into a massive wall of guitar noise, but then "Black Pearl" crashes in with a short but pummeling bit of improvised sludge that reminds me of John Zorn's Painkiller. The beginning of "Our Lady Of Assassins" starts off almost indie rock, like one of the heavier Sonic Youth songs, but keeps cranking the heaviness up bit by bit, and "Finest Craftsmen" is a super short blast of proggy noise rock, Greg Ginn-esque guitar skronk, vicious grindcore and doom metal all rolled into a barely two-minute song. And "Like Water In Water" finishes out The Outer Dark with another brooding, angular dirge with some melodic guitar lodged among the dissonant riffs.

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.