Review Summary: A decent, dirge-filled ambient release.
In my eyes, ambiance is a relatively hit-or-miss idea. Bands catering to an entirely ambient demographic sometimes have a lot to offer and sometimes have one or two soundscapes that they tweak at length for a good sixty minutes (or possibly much longer if it's a discography-lapsing habit). In the so-called "dark ambient" area, the latter seems especially prevalent: many of these bands do their best to create atmosphere, but when their only intent is to make it sound ominous, that atmosphere is expected to fall flat within a relatively short amount of time as the "band" reuses the same ideas in a vain attempt at establishing mood.
In some areas of Inade's offering
The Crackling of the Anonymous, they seems prone to this syndrome, and in others they haplessly fall victim to it. The ten songs here are indeed intended to stir a very dark and sinister feeling within you, doing so through the use of airy, choir-like tone clusters, what sound like shifting string arrangements, reverbed and heavily filtered noises and in a few cases, voice samples. The way they utilize such sounds changes from track to track (though the windy emptiness seems to always be in the background), so in a way they steer clear of keeping things too similar. The only issue is that most tracks are around six and a half minutes, and they don't expand too much on their formulas, they simply mix the same elements in different ways over time. This does tend to get tedious, and luckily the next track usually changes things at least slightly.
Overall, there isn't much to say about
The Crackling of the Anonymous. Inade shows a typical offering of ambient music; it is appropriate listening once in a great while, but it can get dull quickly. It is at least admirable that Inade create something interesting in a field that is over-saturated, but it is definitely not anything spectacular. Nonetheless, anyone interested in this sort of music could go for a listen.
