Review Summary: all my friends are dead
The power of an album to be appealing as the simple sum of its parts is consistently overlooked. It is not necessarily essential for the individual elements of a composition to hide themselves under the façade of originality for something to be exceptional. Of course, hearing something new is always good, but there is something to be said for spinning a new album for the first time and saying, "I know exactly what this sounds like and it's ***ing awesome!"
The Anticonscience, the first release from Styv (aka The Insect Hermit) under the moniker Reclusa, illustrates this point exceptionally well for being such an ambitious debut. The Anticonscience is an album that is unabashedly the sum of its influences and is all the better as a result.
The Anticonscience is essentially this: a doomy industrial record with a whole bunch of ritual ambient and noise mulling around in its filthy caverns. It is probably impossible not to mention Godflesh at some point because such a large part of the record's sound derives from Streetcleaner era Godflesh. However, unlike other forms of Godflesh worship (a certain French band who released a couple of records that subsequently forgot how to be interesting) Reclusa wears its influence on its sleeve with pride, and as a result is able to craft something that is an extension of an established sound rather than a simple copy.
The Anticonscience crawls through each song with a kind of mechanical fervor that fully befits its intentions. It is not mechanical in the sense of going through the motions, but mechanical in a being-crushed-at-12000*F-by-a-big-***ing-steel-plate kind of way. What starts out as a twisted beast in its early stages of depravity ends up devolving into a primordial, formless illustration of pure revulsion.
But what ultimately makes
The Anticonscience engaging is the fact that is has found a way to weave other sounds into the pallet of influence from which it draws seamlessly enough to give the record a definite face value. This is what makes
The Anticonscience a genuine sum of its parts. There is a whole bunch of sick and twisted noise in almost every track, and it works its way around the industrial base seamlessly enough to become an organic part of the record. The same is true of the ritual ambient. The individual elements are present enough to have their own individual weight, almost as if they are their own separate entity, but meld well enough with each other to become an organic and sincere combination.
What Reclusa has ultimately achieved with
The Anticonscience is the further development of an established sound into something engaging enough to warrant merit. While not revolutionary, The Anticonscience makes up for its shortcomings in originality by just doing what is does really well, which is a concept that is often overlooked in its effectiveness. If you pride yourself in being as ***ed up as the music you listen to, this cannot be missed.
