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Anima Morte: The nightmare becomes reality

25/04/13 || Ironpants

Global Domination Parental Advice: This review contains information about music that may appear offensive to trve metal heads. Consult your medical journal before reading.

Italian Vintage Horror Music! How’s that for y’all? Is it a kind of narrow sub genre maybe? Does this review even fit the agenda here at GD? Well that’s in the eye of the beholder, and if you are actually reading my rants here, I guess that it do belong? Bare with me, and tag along.

Metal and horror has always had a special connection. Starting out back in the days, with Alice Cooper & Kiss before moving on to bigger, badder and baddest. At the moment, it has gone so far, that almost no one even react with a wink of an eye when there’s blood and gore both on stage and/or lyric wise. What’s next you may think? I’m still waiting for the first dudes to commit actual suicide on stage or a band amputating themselves limb for limb at every show (there’s a slight problem in that scenario though).

In the movie industry, shit really hit the fan when the Italians started to move things to another level. When the masters Dario Argento and Lucio Fulcio began to spread their infamous movies “Suspiria”, “Phenomena”, “The Beyond”, “Tenebre”, “Zombi”. When I saw those flicks the first time, I had my hands full with acting cool and whipping out gross one-liners, ´cause I didn’t want my friends to catch me acting like a pussy, hiding behind pillows and cats or whatever was at hand. As with every poison/adrenaline/drug you expose yourself, and as soon as that first ball tickle that keeps you on your toes vanishes, you move on to heavier stuff for new thrills. It’s the same with music more or less, just when you think someone has broken a barrier in brutality or speed, some other random dude’s come along with an even more surprising album regarding aforementioned treats.

But there is one thing about these old school Italian horror movies that never really has been recreated, and thats the progressive rock side of the film scores that accompanied them. Bands like Goblin or the Italian horror movies equivalent of John Williams – Fabio Frizzi, finished the result with proggy tunes that as strange it may sound actually helped to enhance the movies desired effect. Often these film scores was played by an actual band, such as Goblin, or a composer wrote the music alone and put together some of the finest studio musicians there were available at the time and recorded magic. When I think about it now, the more recent movie “28 days later” has a similar sound to it’s soundtrack, that old school proggy sound.

This isn’t the kind of music you sit around and discuss with outside friends, such as workmates. You can try, but they will loose you at the first movie named, or even when you start to describe the music, they won’t get it. You need to have that special gene inside activated to appreciate this kind of music. No, this is one-man music, maybe 2-3 man tops, if you’re lucky to have friends as equally tasteful as you.

Anima Morte is the band that thinks like you, and have unlike you, recorded a masterpiece based around this kind of movie music. Or actually, this is their second album and the first is equally enjoyable, but I find their latest offering to be a little higher in standard. The band itself has metal connections in Fredrik Klingvall (keys, Loch Vostok) and Teddy Möller (drums, F.K.Ü and vocals/guitar in Loch Vostok). The other dudes I don’t know so much about, more than the very obvious fact that they are very skilled.

The album it self contains 11 tracks, all instrumental, and recorded with the standard setting of guitar, bass, drums and keyboards, but they use some extra spice from Moog and various other instruments, such as mellotron and bouzouki.
And boy are we in for a ride on this one? Right from the first note you are transported to the mid 80’s and you remember those notes that accompanied the horrors projected on the screen.

The music isn’t scary or evil in any way at all, eerie at most, but all the songs tell small stories by themselves . It is actual real songs, not random movie sound effects, and with no lyrics to accompany the music, the instruments must step up and picture the feelings and emotions that is to be highlighted. For example in “The dead will walk the earth”, it is very easy to imagine an abandoned city, and you stand on a rooftop looking out over the city, zombies stagger around everywhere and you are completely alone. Or in “Corridors of blood”, “Contamination”, “Solemn graves” or any of the other songs it’s not that hard to imagine various scenarios inside your head that can accompany the music. My best advice here is to lay down with earphones on, close your eyes and let the music take you away to an inner cinema where your imagination is the projector. Keep your clothes on or it´s easy to loose control and let your hands be the interactive agent for your journey, and the song “Passage of Darkness” or “Things to come” could turn into an XX-rated inner movie.

The musicianship presented is outstanding and all involved members handle their instruments delicately, and nothing is really allowed to excel and take over, which is quite natural. It’s no instrument-masturbation-bonanza we are invited to, but just because of the vast amount of “proginess” there are a lot of cool twists and turns in the rhythm department. These people are very skilled musicians and composers which is apparent right from the start. I know that because of the “non-metal” factor, a lot of people aren’t even gonna let this baby in, and mumble stuff about “this ain’t metal” but i beg to differ. The atmosphere and history of the origins to this kind of music is more metal than all of us together. There aren’t a metal dude around that hasn’t feasted on the movies from this era, the movies had an major impact on the horror movie genre and it’s only fair that the music is allowed to have it’s turn. I don’t know how many times I have listened to this record, and I never get tired from it. It searches it self into your backbone and plants it self firmly and craves you to listen to it over and over again. Give it a spin, then enter the forums and tell me what a soft guy I am.

Behold!

Information
Released: 2011
Label: Transubstans Records
Website: www.animamorte.com
Band
Daniel Cannerfelt: electric & acoustic guitars
Stefan Granberg: bass, bouzouki, electric & acoustic guitar, synthesizers
Fredrik Klingvall: synthesizers, mellotron, rhodes, taurus, additional guitars
Teddy Möller: drums
Guests
Mattias Olsson: percussion, bowed guitar, noise general
Jerk Wååg: piano, violins

Tracklist
01. Voices from beyond
02. Corridor of blood
03. The revenant
04. Contamination
05. Passage of darkness
06. Solemn of graves
07. Delirious
08. Feast of feralia
09. The nightmare becomes reality
10. Things to come
11. The dead will walk the earth

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