High praise? Certainly. Taken as a whole, the entire disc becomes a complete work. The digipak’s oversized booklet featuring the designs of Storm Thorgerson heir apparent Travis Smith doesn’t simply present pictures to illustrate words, just as the music doesn’t simply exist to get tangled in one’s head. However, without imagery, pictures still find their way into the listener’s mind: the soft, melancholy ballad “Are You There?”, the vocoderized vocal on “Closer” imploring “the dream world is a very scary place to be trapped inside”, the panicky power explosion of “Pulled Under At 2000 Metres A Second”, and with each track, you’re led into a new revelation and you don’t think it can possibly get better, richer, stranger, scarier… And then it does.
The last two tracks on the disc will get stuck under your skin and stay for a long, long time. “Electricity”, with its Coldplay-like feel pulls you close as the lyric, “electricity, it drew you near to me, what you needed was to be rid of me” pushes you away. It is gorgeous, haunting, elegant and the band has never sounded better.
The finale, the aching instrumental “Violence” is thoroughly representational as a piano musical passage morphs into a blistering full band blast of thunder. Then it subsides, leaving the soft music alone, like a victim who now must cope with the aftermath, and where such dependence on long-held whole notes seems like a really bad idea, the band has the talent and the respect for the audience not to cut it short or dumb it down. The effects of violence is a scar that remains long after the occurrence, and like only the best composers can, Anathema presents it to you, dares you to look away and forces you to study the remnant scar through nothing more than music.
Vincent Cavanaugh’s singing is the cure for all those modern rock voices congealing into a faceless similarity. Perfectly clean, and then gut-wrenchingly aggressive, and then amorphous and ghostly, he takes his own spotlight with him. No whining, no melodramatic flourishes or contrivance. While not sounding like Audioslave’s Chris Cornell, he shares that unique distinction of sounding like a rock singer “should”. The rest of the band, consisting of brothers Danny and Jamie (guitars, bass, keys), John Douglas (drums) and Les Smith (keyboards) present to you the fulfillment of what this type of music was supposed to be, a fully realized artistic expression unaware of the clichés of the “modern rock group”. Describing it to you is pointless. You have to hear it.
I have recently stopped listening to regular radio stations in my car, preferring the primarily ‘talk-format’ National Public programming. The reason why is because all the heavy bands sound the same to me, all growl and single power chords crunched out ad infinitum, ad nauseum. All the punk-pop bands have that same snotty, pubescent tone across the board. The remainder wants to sound like shadows of 70s icons. They represent the MP3 generation, preferring the parts to the sum total. Anathema’s A Natural Disaster stands apart and against that philosophy and presents itself as a necessity for anyone who looks to the future of this style of music.
Occasionally, a band makes something with the potential to change everything. This is it.
