Damn, this has been a long time coming. Five years elapsed between 2011’s Worship Music and 2016’s For All Kings, but Scott Ian and co. have managed to double the wait time and taken a full decade to deliver this, their twelfth studio album. However, the drought has ended with a glorious tsunami of prime Anthrax.
Of course, there was the small matter of the pandemic to get through, plus chief riff writer/drummer Charlie Benante and lyricist/guitarist Scott Ian suffering somewhat from writer’s block. Now that it’s here and suddenly bludgeoning you about the ears, though, you realise what’s been missing from heavy music for the past 10 years. It feels more epic and more compelling because of the wait; the cryptic Latin poetry of the title – translating as ‘my journey ends here’ – encompasses the finality of its arrival.
Despite the title, though, this is definitely not the end, or even the twilight, of Anthrax’s career – they couldn’t sound more alive and metal-thrashing mad than this if they tried. Teaming up with producer Jay Ruston for a third time, the result is satisfyingly weighty, dense with ideas and packed with great riffs – a furious, playful, slammingly serious return to form.
Kicking off with the short introductory passage Persistence Of Memory, the album proper begins with The Long Goodbye, about Ian’s dad’s battle with Alzheimer’s. That emotional, grand, melodic, mid-paced opener is followed by It’s For The Kids, a straight-up Anthrax thrasher in classic style, complete with pounding mosh part.
The strong opening one-two merely hints at the riches to come: an imaginative blend of flame-throwing speed and more mid-paced but no less aggressive, melodic metal. There are full-on, breakneck thrash monsters like NYC 93, the lightspeed blur that is Watch It Go, the crushing Target On My Back (TOMB) and the thunderous technical bruiser My Victory. Everybody’s Got A Plan and Infectious – including a callback to Captain Trips from 1987’s Among The Living – duke it out for the album’s earworm prize, and the immense title track and The Edge Of Perfection compete with The Long Goodbye for sheer scale and drama.
The variety is hugely impressive, the delivery a hundred per cent on-point. Hopefully this album marks not just the end of one journey but the beginning of a latter-career renaissance. And let’s have the next in under a decade, please.
(LouderSound)
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