Bristol behemoths of prog ANTA are on to their third album and — God aren’t they lucky? — third Freq review by yours truly. They will no doubt be rubbing their gongs in anticipation.
Considering they’re a prog band, they’re not an impolite one – thirty-six taut minutes and only four songs, but they’re obviously abiding by “just because we can doesn’t mean we should” with song length. Correctly.
It’s probably the case that where ANTA do best in the prog rock milieu is that they’re not a flabby band; typically a motif appears once or twice, is extemporised on, and then disappears: leave ’em wanting more. A definite sense of ‘composed not jammed’, or at least, edited without needing to give everyone a solo. The riffs are heavy and scronchy — opener “QTFK” has some great heavy maths rock guitaring, closer “Organesson” has some genuinely meaty riffagé.For my money, my problem with prog is that it misses out on colour and variation — it’s all well and good having twenty-minute songs, but if it’s effectively five songs shunted together, or one idea drilled into the ground, it’s just pish. Not the case with ANTA — they do move around a lot, but keep harmonic and melodic continuity; there’s plenty of time signature-hopping, but it’s complementary rather than discontinuous (which very quickly sounds like smart-arsery in my book).
Being modern lads there’s plenty of decently chunky riffing. But also it’s not purely rockist posturing — the keys from Alex Bertram-Powell are prominent and add a harmonic language that’s too often missing from rock music. Distribute your chords across the ensemble, rock bands! Another good ANTA-ism (which is actually just good musical practice) — not everyone needs to play always. Plenty of instances of that here, especially on “Artus Telum”, which does a great job of being faintly churchy without (I think) using any plagal cadences.
I’ve not had a physical copy of this yet but I do have their first LP, Centaurionaut, with its red-splatter vinyl and genuinely lovely looking sleeve design, so I have no doubt that Organesson will follow suit. Only 300 copies and I should imagine they’re quite anticipated, so probably worth whipping this up at your next convenience. Get down and get proggy.
-Kev Nickells-
