Saturday 7 June 2014

Anathema for my ears

This post is not geeky and definitely not a rant. Far from!

I have been a long standing fan of Anathema's. I remember listening to the Eternity album in a bar in Athens shortly after its release. I remember the guys sitting at the table next to me ranting "blergh, this is rubbish, they've gone too soft". I remember thinking "What the devil are these chaps talking about? This is brilliant! What's this band called???". I swiftly spent my hard-earned pocket money to buy Eternity on the very same day.

Anathema then released "Alternative 4", but what really did it for me was when I saw them live at the Rodon Club in Athens shortly before the release of "Judgment". Surely, they played all the great stuff that they had already released, but they also gave us a sneak-peak of their upcoming release, by performing "Deep" and "Judgement".

That was it. Helplessly, hopelessly and irrevocably in love with them.

Fast forward 15 years, their style has changed a fair bit, but I'm still a huge fan and I've had the opportunity to see them live at Donington during the Download Festival 2010. I just found out about the upcoming release of their new "Distant Satellites" album. I pre-ordered it before I even listened to samples, which is exactly what I'm doing as I'm writing this post.

First track starts playing, and ten seconds in I felt an irresistible urge to write this and to scream out loud that this is another bloody great piece of work. Now if you know me, you know that I am passionate about music, but never before have I been so excited by a new release to blog about it.

If you like Anathema, do yourself a favour and buy Distant Satellites. If you've not heard of them before, do yourself a favour and listen to this.

And I thought "Weather Systems" was great...