Dark Arms Reach Skyward With Bone White Fingers (studio album) by Anna Pest

From Mercury 04/12/2021 18:23

(A very strange gumbo of genres, all created by a one woman wrecking ball of wild energy and surprising virtuosity. The odd switch ups and mixing of styles may not always work, but for the most part this is a strangely fascinating and intense mix of Tech/Brutal Death Metal, Grindcore, Mathcore, and even some weirdly clean vocal-heavy almost pop sounding bits.)

Some of the moments on this album made me laugh. I don't know if that is what Anna Pest was going for on these moments when the clean female vocals come in and create a pop vibe in the midst of walls of extreme metal chaos, but that is what happened. It wasn't a ridiculing laugh, it was more a laugh from true and authentic surprise. Once I got used to the dynamics and the possibilities of this album I settled in and found myself pretty pumped with the whole thing. The intense and breakneck speed of the music and the way it can shift in a millsecond from Grindey visciousness to Progressive metal wankery, to Brutal death metal with serious heavy groove to a clean pop sounding vocal mixed with almost groove metal sounds, to super technical starnge time signature Death Metal to an almost impossibly fast double bass percussive onslaught, to a moment with weird electronic sounds being introduced etc etc etc... it left me not a second of chill time, there is always something going on and something quite intense at that. It's marvelously off the wall, energetic and memorable.

The critiques are simply based around the feeling I got that some of the more over-the-top surprising bits just felt a little cheap and a little TOO off the wall and didn't feel really fitting for the music. Often times these left turn momnets work really well, other times quite badly. Thankfully this album doesn't stick to a sound or groove or idea very long - whether good or great or questionable or bad - and so before I can start lamenting the sound that is battering my ears, a new one comes in and grabs my attention instead.

Overall the album sounds pretty good. Some of the drum sounds are a bit thin and weak, but not always. The general production isn't great but generally fine, and though there are times when the whole package comes across like it has something missing production-wise to make all the instruments gel, the parts that are meant to absolutely bash your face in are recorded in a way whioch is quite overwhelming in a great way.

Overall, I really liked this and I am glad after several months of sort of hanging around it and almost checking it out I finally pushed play. This is a very weird and distinctive and damn impressive One-person project and it deserves some attention from people who love the more intense and insane and brutal strains of Death metal and Grindcore. Also super interested to see where Anna Pest (real name April Hutchins) goes from here.