Album Review: Amenra - De Toorn / With Fang and Claw
Reviewed by Dan Barnes
Formed back in 1999 and playing out of Kortrijk, Belgium, post metal heavy weights – and perennial Damnation Festival favourites - Amenra, return to the recording arena with two EPs of new material, their first since the De Doorn full-length back in 2019.
While each title is intended to stand alone and reflects a specific era of the band, they can be brought together to form a singular, two-part journey through the band’s past.
Looking at the more recent days of Amenra and acting as something of a continuation of the last album, De Toorn, the longer of the two records at twenty-five-and-a-half minutes, was recorded in a single session and brings the curtain down on the deeply personal themes of De Doorn.
Both Heden and De Toorn (Talisman) follow a similar structure: both clock in close to quarter of an hour and both spend their opening two-thirds building atmosphere, before unleashing a barrage of pent-up aggression on the unsuspecting listener.
Heden is the longer of the two pieces and opens with a deep, ominous bass drum, pounding a slow, inexorable beat; a fat string vibrates in time with the knocks, slowing developing its pace and keeping low and ambient. Some words are spoken as the lightest of guitar stings begin to pick out shapes in the darkness.
As it builds it starts to morph through unmistakeable post metal motifs and the inventiveness of Tool interludes; notes fall like drop of water and Colin H. Van Eeckhout’s vocals become unerringly Maynard James Keenan-like. All the while it feels like something is growing with the music, something that will burst at any moments and, when silence descends, it’s only a matter of time before Heden reaches its critical mass and explodes with heavy, blasting guitars, producing swirling post metal riffs that hit like waves; Colin’s voice screams until a haunting vocal takes the track to silence.
De Toorn (Talisman) follows much the same song structure, yet the opening section acts more like an overture to the final, aggressive part. The ambience of Heden’s beginning is absent, populated instead by stark strings and a militaristic drum. The spoken vocals are accompanied by more complex guitar patterns, through there is no urgency in this progression.
Things start to gather pace at the halfway point, following a sparse bass section, when the huge percussion and ascending guitar shift the track into an unrelentingly bleak mode. All the themes and ideas that had brought us to this point are stripped of their bonds and given free rein to grow and explore. Hard and brutal riffs are fully fleshed from the resonances of earlier and, rather than the haunting vocal, this one ends with a caveman rant.
The second EP, With Fang and Claw, takes the band back to their roots, merging the contemporary sound of their later material with the fire and youthful exuberance of the formative records.
With a combined running time of Heden, this second EPs two songs are more a concentration of the essence of Amenra and, although Forlorn starts slowly, it doesn’t take too long to lock into its solid post metal grooves. There’s an ambient section quite early on, which finds guitars folding into each other; another one comes later after the maelstrom of the mid-section, showing how post metal thrives on the blending of the harsh and aggressive with the gentle and fragile.
It's a modern version of the progressive extended run time and musical storytelling, though Salve Mater is the shortest and most directly post metal sounding track on either disc, that does not mean it’s devoid of the affectations of Amenra’s creative ingenuity. Its ambient passage is an oasis amid a
gathering storm. When it’s raging, Salve Mater is perhaps the most aggravated sounding tune on offer.
Put together these two EPs form the bridge to what the band see as the direction for Mass VII. With their thirtieth anniversary looming closer than they’d perhaps like to admit, it’s a way for Amenra to lay the past to rest, free to explore ever-new avenues of creativity.
Which should you get? Well, both of them, though depending on how you like your extreme music might suggest one will be listened to more than the other, but not that much more, to be honest.
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