Anathema

Anathema have always had the courage to evolve. Never through sudden breaks or twists, but by gradually mutating, much like their own songs. Starting out in the depths of British death-doom metal in the early Nineties, they gradually shed their metal roots to explore more atmospheric and reflective sonic territories, turning themselves, with “Alternative 4” and “A Fine Day To Exit”, into one of the most singular voices in European alternative rock. With “A Natural Disaster”, released in 2003, the Liverpool band pushes even further, building an album that fuses metal echoes, alt-rock, trip-hop and post-rock into a new form of progressive rock, a narrative flow of shifting, layered emotions.

Defining Anathema's stylistic landing point simply as “prog” would ultimately be misleading. Their approach doesn't look back to the great names of the Seventies, but seeks a modern, personal path: one focused not on odd time signatures and sudden twists, but on immersion in rich, ever-shifting atmospheres. On “A Natural Disaster”, each song represents an emotional progression running through different shades, with the tension between opposites – shadow and light, intensity and rarefaction – guiding the exploration of the sonic landscape.

Tracks like “Harmonium” and “Violence”, the album's opener and closer respectively, clearly exemplify this attitude. The former opens bare and almost hypnotic, building a crescendo that culminates in a heavy, monolithic finale recalling their metal roots. The latter is the longest piece on the record: eleven minutes that flow from pianistic minimalism to double-pedal metallic passages, before dissolving into a long, atmospheric epilogue.

A similar horizon is shared, roughly in the same years, by other bands for which the effective term “post-progressive“ has been used for some time now. European acts like Gathering and Katatonia, who likewise started out in death/doom and moved over time toward a sprawling, evocative alt-rock (in Gathering's case also tinged with trip-hop). Or the American Dredg, who crafted with “El Cielo” (2002) a gorgeously melodic and imaginative synthesis of post-hardcore, alternative rock and post-rock. But also artists on decidedly different paths, like new prog veterans Marillion after Steve Hogarth's arrival, or Archive – who had set out from trip-hop – or Elbow, emerging from the post-Britpop galaxy.

With “A Natural Disaster”, this approach reaches one of its clearest and most accomplished expressions. Its core lies in building climaxes and sonic layers by stacking guitars, piano, synths and filtered vocals, and “Balance” serves as the paradigm for this scheme: over the melancholy sound of electric piano rests a quiet/loud-style crescendo, where the guitars gradually rise in pitch and intensity until reaching an overwhelming emotional impact. The track flows into the following “Closer”, which reprises its theme and structure with the addition of a cybernetic vocoder that lends the song a spiritual, almost ethereal aura (an idea already explored in the prog/death metal field by Cynic).

While its attention to swelling dynamics naturally brings the formula close to artists like Mogwai and Explosions In The Sky, other tracks reveal an openness to electronic textures that instead recalls the Radiohead of “Kid A” and “Amnesiac“, albums from a few years earlier that were a clear reference point for the band. The title track, “A Natural Disaster”, exemplifies the originality of this union: an almost trip-hop rhythm, limpid arpeggios and the evocative voice of guest singer Lee Douglas create a mix reminiscent of Portishead (another of Anathema's fixations), but the chorus breaks the stagnant atmosphere, trying to find light within the immutability of time gone by: “Cause no matter what I say/ No matter what I do/ I can’t change what happened”.

Lyrics indeed play a crucial role in defining the album's mood. “A Natural Disaster” explores existential themes, reflections on memory, pain and the search for inner freedom. “Pulled Under At 2000 Meters A Second” is perhaps the most representative track of this philosophical dimension. Opening with a triplet feel that quickly turns into a cathartic scream, the track unleashes post-metal textures not far from Isis and Pelican to paint freedom as a mirage – one of the most intense messages on the record: “Freedom is only a hallucination/ That waits at the edge of the distant horizon”.

On “Flying”, the metaphor of flight becomes a reflection on the search for inner truth and the alternation between moments of elevation and falls. The harmonic progression is just the right amount of Radiohead-esque, a bare-bones reduction of “Exit Music (For A Film)” that, moving from the minor chord on the root to the major fifth – non-diatonic and desperately seeking resolution – creates a sense of both lift and pull back toward the ground, perfectly mirrored in the lyrics: “It feels like I’m flying above you/ Dream that I’m dying to find the truth/ Seems like you’re trying to bring me down/ Back down to earth”.

There are no words, however, accompanying “Childhood Dream”, a delicate acoustic-guitar interlude, enriched by distant childlike voices and backwards-played sounds. Its suspended mood, playful yet steeped in an almost late-Floyd-esque nostalgia, is one of those small wonders that seem to spring directly from the intimacy among the band's members. Anathema is a “family-run” project: the core of “A Natural Disaster” consists of the three Cavanagh brothers, Vincent (vocals and guitar), Danny (guitar and keyboards) and Jamie (bass). Rounding out the lineup are Les Smith (keyboards and programming) and John Douglas (drums), plus his sister Lee Douglas (vocals, a guest on this album, a full band member from 2005 onward). In an interview with OndaRock, Vincent Cavanagh stressed just how essential the family bond is for the group: “We're a big family, in the sense that John is also my brother and Lee is also my sister! We're always together, even when we're not making music, it's our most important trait as a band. Especially when it comes to me, Danny and John: try to take us and keep us apart, or have us play separately, and you'll see we're just not capable of it. It would be as if each of us lost a part of ourselves.” “Electricity” too glows with an almost domestic familiarity, a languid warmth that, from a piano pedal note and words barely more than whispered, draws out a result once again far more melancholy than radiant.

“A Natural Disaster” doesn't mark a turning point in Anathema's career, but rather a particularly accomplished milestone in a journey guided by constant movement as its north star. “Are You There?” embodies this nature perhaps more than any other track: soft drums and shimmering guitar notes trace a light, open gait, while synth pads and a faint, pensive voice add a veil of unease. The song seems to search for balance without ever settling into it, in a dynamic tension that transcends the musical experience, drawing the listener into a search that is no longer merely artistic, but essential:

And its wearing me down

And its turning me round

And I can’t find a way now to find it out

Where are you when I need you?

Are you there?

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12/01/2025