The Anix – Voltage
The Anix – Voltage
FiXT Records
Release Date: 22/11/24
Running Time: 34:18
Review by Dark Juan
9/10
Good morning, dear friends. I know it is rare to hear from Dark Juan before lunchtime, as I am a creature of the night and sleep away the daylight hours. You will, being intimately familiar with my writing by now (Hahahahahaha) remember that I reviewed The Anix back in 2022 (https://www.ever-metal.com/2022/07/22/the-anix-demolition-city-re-issue/ being the fine piece of work you should reference) and really quite enjoyed the re-issue of “Demolition City”, so when I saw that The Anix had released “Voltage” I was all over it faster than I would go into a Dutch brothel. The Platter of Splatter ™ was torn from its quiet alcove and had the disc shoved roughly and excitedly within and in moments I was transported far away from the fact that the Schwerer Gothikpanzer is costing me an arm and a leg just before Yuletide, and instead free falling into the sounds that the good burghers of Mega City One might find popular, being as The Anix serves the listener with a beguiling mix of Metal, Industrial, Pop hooks the size of planets and percussive battering.
Epic, mid-paced music, very reminiscent of Filter at their finest when the tone takes a more Metallic one, melded to the Industrial pummelling of Nine Inch Nails – huge choruses (‘Poltergeist’ especially is a big hitter in the massive chorus and relieving young ladies of their panties department) are slammed into the bleakness of Post-Punk and the effect is nothing short of strobe-lighted ass-kickings dealt out by replicants and zaibatsu razorgirls in the seedy underbelly of a retro-futuristic city, the streets in front of pachinko parlours and the brothels where the meat puppets ply their trade to fat and sweaty businessmen and the unloved and the Judges pass it all by on their roaring Lawmasters because there is another block war going on at the corner of Abbott and Costello, the twin Minogue Towers showering glass, lead and explosives all over the skedways and pedways and citizens scatter, desperate for cover…
The unloved are who are going to get the most of this album. It has a plaintive feel about it and is The Anix at his most introspective, dealing with issues such as urban loneliness, isolation and melancholy. This is reflected in the music, which has lost much of the polished shine of “Demolition City” in favour of a much more subdued and darker palette of sounds that are able to tug at the heartstrings in a disturbingly effective fashion. Damn The Anix and his well-crafted music that is making Dark Juan have feelings. I really didn’t think that I had any left and it is slightly concerning that I do!
The album opens with the aural gutpunch that is ‘Disarm’, all swaggering Alt-Metal gorgeousness, a chorus you could catch megalodons with and a guitar sound that tears at the belly of the listener until glistening entrails spill out in front of them. It’s a hell of an opener and guaranteed to dissolve the underwear of the listener whatever their gender. There’s going to be a lot of confused fans on mass transport when they stand up and find that their smalls have magically disappeared and it’s chilly outside. This crunchiness is served with a side order of deranged Electronics that bleep and squelch malevolently beneath the surface of the music, whereas ‘CRAWL’ (featuring Julien-K) carries on with this blueprint but adds a certain Post-Rock coldness to the music that hints at rage and heartbreak combined. You know what I mean, the feeling you get a day or two after being binned off and you suddenly get the feeling that it isn’t fucking fair and then you are just raging at the injustice of it all… ‘XRAY’ changes up the dynamic somewhat and suddenly we are transported to the realms of 80’s British Electropop and New Romanticism. Considering Dark Juan grew up when those genres were massive and all-pervading, this song that fuses modernism, Duran Duran and Orchestral Manoeuvres in The Dark is a Very Good Thing indeed, whereas ‘Sinking Alone’ is as Grunge as Grunge can be with an Electronic undertone. ‘PANIC’ is almost Nu-Metal in the chorus and the verses meld Alternative Metal with Electronic Rock and the whole thing is a beautiful, yet ineffably sad beast that mournfully looks about itself for comfort and companionship and finds nothing apart from wet concrete and unwelcoming Brutalism. This almost Joy Division-like level of alienation plays along in every lyric and every piece of music on “Voltage”, and it is a much more affecting work than any of The Anix’s previous albums.
As usual with work of The Anix, the production and the overall sound of the record is meticulous, clean and polished to an eye-watering shine and benefitting from extreme clarity wrapped up in The Anix’s unique and distinctive sound design. Which makes a change from one-man Black Metal projects who have recorded it in the cupboard under the stairs with a Fisher-Price microphone and a cheap-ass Gear4Music guitar.
To sum up then – The Anix has released yet another finely-crafted future classic, in Dark Juan’s opinion. Bleak, yet with a surprising humanity beneath the alienation, “Voltage” is a worthy addition to an already impressive canon and therefore the Patented Dark Juan Blood Splat Rating System awards The Anix 9/10 for a really fucking enjoyable record, once you have finished bawling your eyes out.
TRACKLISTING:
01. Disarm
02. CRAWL
03. XRAY
04. Gravity
05. Sinking
06. Locked Door
07. Poltergeist
08. Shadow
09. PANIC
10. GO
LINE-UP:
Brandon Smith – everything. He’s a handsome bastard as well as talented. I hate him. I HATE HIM!!!
LINKS:
