Review Summary: Beauty behind the grit
Think very hard about the artists that first leap to mind when you hear the phrase “electronic rock”. What pops up? Maybe someone like Celldweller, or Blue Stahli, or some of Linkin Park’s efforts perhaps? These artists all have something very similar that unifies their different albums and works: a sense of energy and aggression through guitars and drums, with gritty electronic elements backing them up. That’s what made The Anix such a unique electronic rock artist when I first discovered him on
Hologram.
On The Anix’s second album with FiXT Music, sole member Brandon Smith trades in the aggression that is so common in this genre for a sense of beauty. Granted, the grit is still there, especially when you compare this effort to his prior album
Shadow_Movement, but it’s most certainly not approaching the realm of metal by any stretch of the imagination (barring one singular song). Rather, it’s an album that pulls from multiple different artists and styles to create a unique journey through gritty guitars and sweeping synths.
Linking all of this together is Smith’s voice, far softer and smoother than his contemporaries, both on the FiXT label and beyond. It lends the album this ethereal quality, almost shoegaze-like in its sound. It’s like riding this gorgeous electronic wave, a journey across neon-lit city slum streets, marked by several heavy hitter tracks that will remain stuck in your brain for a while.
“Renegade” is one of The Anix’s greatest songs, a cyberpunk dream that starts off subdued in the verse before exploding with gritty guitar chords and serene vocals in the chorus. The following track, “Enemy in the Mirror”, delivers a more urgent sound, with harder hitting drums and Smith’s repetitions of the song title in between verses. Elsewhere, Smith covers Deftones’ “Digital Bath”, which fits his style like a glove. Coincidentally, it happens to be where Smith breaks out his most intense and powerful vocals on the album, which further helps this track to stand out amongst the rest of the album. Last but not least, “Chrome” delivers one of the album’s grandest and biggest choruses as Smith croons “
Stay awake/You might erase tonight”.
However, there’s a bit of an issue: these tracks are so strong that the rest of the album doesn’t feel as notable by comparison. Don’t get me wrong, the tracklist is insanely good, and you’ll never regret listening to this album in a single sitting. But the rest of the tracks just can’t match the album’s strongest moments, and so they may end up fading into the background of your memory. Still, it doesn’t detract from the wonder and beauty of this album, a statement for The Anix that makes them, in my opinion, one of the greatest artists currently signed under FiXT.
