Before there were blogs there were these things called magazines, and the only metal magazine we still get excited about reading every month is Decibel. Here’s managing editor Andrew Bonazelli…

Today’s “Fear, Emptiness, Decibel” is basically a bulletin informing you about our Anaal Nathrakh Flexi Series stream. Or, as the editor-in-chief just referred to it via IM, our “anaal stream.” Being a five-year-old boy (in a 12-year-old girl’s body), I promptly hit Google for more “anal/anaal” puns to annoy you with, but forgot that their autocomplete is totally PG-13; their two options for anal (“anal cancer treatment” and “anal cancer staging”) aren’t exactly knee-slappers.

So, in lieu of buttplay humor, let’s just acknowledge the many blackened-grind merits of AN. Which are precisely what allow Irrumator and V.I.T.R.I.O.L. to do totally back-of-the-left-field-bleachers shit, like cover the Specials for the Flexi Series. Their interpretation of the checkered icons’ “Man at C&A” is just the right blend of WTF and gnarly that we were hoping for when this series launched. It’s streaming right here:

Anaal Nathrakh “Man at C&A” (dB011) by Decibel Magazine

It appears in silver on yellow glory in the November Decibel—for subscribers only—but there are a limited number of copies available in the webstore, so get there pronto.

-AB

Decibel’s November 2011 issue also features Skeletonwitch, Alice Cooper, Brutal Truth, Machine Head, Chimaira,  and a Ministry Hall of Fame. But why not just get a full subscription to ensure that you never miss an issue?

Anaal Nathrakh’s seemingly permanent problem — that it will never top it’s brilliant debut, the filthy The Codex Necro – isn’t unique to them, nor even unique to metal. Like Nas — who arrived with Illmatic, one of the hip-hop’s most influential albums, and has subsequently tried to top it for almost two decades, at best coming somewhat close and at worst falling embarrassingly short — their first official effort set an impossibly high watermark. But unlike Nas, the band have never given the impression that they’re trying to recapture lightening in a bottle, which could be why The Codex Necro feels less like a fluke and more like a sturdy foundation for the band’s career. After introducing clean singing on their next album (Domine Non Es Dignus), it was clear if they couldn’t shoot past their debut’s excellence, they could fire to the left of it. So while Anaal Nathrakh have never been as good as they were on Codex Necro – and arguably never will be — their catalog has been remarkably consistent in its wake. Nas positioned himself to have to compete with hip-hop’s brightest stars while his was on the wane; Anaal Nathrakh have only had to compete with themselves. Even in a relatively diminished capacity, there are few that are more fierce and eviscerating as them.

So while the band have been wobbling back and forth between great albums (Eschanton, The Constellation of the Black Widow) and spotty ones (Dignus, Hell is Empty and All the Devils are Here), they haven’t come as close to the viciousness of their debut as they do on Passion (oddly enough, their most subdued album title yet). Though it lacks Codex’s red-eyed anger and grime-caked production, it tweaks the band’s post-Necro additions — big choruses and tempos below that of “ridiculously fast” — to seeming perfection. Perhaps it’s unfair to hold them to an impossible standard, but if one must, Passion is as good as the band can get. “All killer, no filler” feels literal in its context.

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Today is the kind of day that makes me wanna go up to the roof of the MetalSucks Mansion with a gun and just start picking people off. Luckily for everyone, then, that a) I don’t actually own a gun, and b) there’s new music from the UK’s extreme industrial blackened death grind act, Anaal Nathrakh, currently streaming on the band’s MySpace page.

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