Hi there, hello.
Welcome to this review newsletter where I use you as a sounding board for my feelings on music releases. Today we’re looking at Anthropos by Krig.
On a random day in January, Billy hit me up to chat about some of the music he had been listening to in the past few months. One of the bands he told me about was Krig, an Extreme Metal band from Brazil with progressive leanings in their sound.
We’ve been friends for almost a decade and he knew I had a thing for progressive and technical metal — because I think being able to make music like that is super cool. It’s also been a while since I had found or listened to any music in this genre pocket made by Christians, so I was stoked to check it out.
Anthropos is the latest effort from Krig, released in April 2022. The album kicks off with the title track. With a runtime of about two and a half minute minutes, this tune kicks off with a mellow instrumental segment that gives off a classical music/movie score vibe, before transitioning into a distorted guitar segment with the same melody as its predecessor.
This is followed by the heavy and relentless assault of a track called “Self Control”. While it does feature some good ideas, I felt they fell a little short in the execution department. “Third Millennium Terrorism” comes next and it does not let up the pump and energy. This is the highlight of the album for me and there’s a bridge section after the chorus that really gets me grooving.
“Promiscuity Of The Body” kicks things up a notch and this is where the death metal influences on their sound take centre stage. While I am not a big fan of pure death metal, I have enjoyed a few songs and albums in that sub-genre and this song is quite good too.
Things slow down on “Tribal Legacy”, a purely acoustic instrumental track that features some pretty good instrumental harmonies between the band members. The ferocity returns on “Measuring With My Ruler”, a song with different segments but not so much that the song gets ‘lost in the sauce’, as the kids say.
“Depravity of Human Flesh”, one of the singles released prior to the album, continues the death metal leanings that I talked about earlier and does a good job of keeping things fresh and making the songs feel distinct from one another.
“Anamnesis” comes in next with a leading riff that feels like classic heavy/thrash metal before the more groovy/ferocious riffage comes in. That classic heavy metal riff is also used to close out the song after the seemingly needless — but welcome — assault on the ears which I commend them for.
The album closes with the track “Foolish Evildoers VI”. Now I am not a long-time fan or anything, but I did look through their discography and noticed that this song is a part of long-running series that covers many of their full-length or compilation album releases.
In a bid to gather my thoughts, I have to start by saying that Anthropos as a whole is full of good ideas. Great ideas, even. The lyrical themes range from speaking on the evils of the world to the effects of being led by the flesh instead of the Spirit. These are themes I resonate with quite strongly.
The primary issue I have with this album lies in its execution. There are moments on the album where it is not clear if they were trying to go for odd time signatures or if the notes were just played at the wrong time or off rhythm.
The experience can also be said about vocal delivery in certain sections of tracks where there is dissonance and words didn’t seem to be said/yelled/growled on the right note or the right beat. These things can be quite distracting and stop quite a few tracks from being really awesome.
Nonetheless, Krig is a good band, with a solid message and great musical ideas. I would really like to listen to future albums as they grow and improve in their craft.
Genre(s): Progressive Death Metal
RATING
: 2.8/5
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That’s it from me.
Bye for now.
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Hmmmm. Hmmmm. Hmmmm
Nice analysis, Samson.
All I see are Group 1 elements everywhere.
😁