Anekdoten
Nucleus

"Tarots and the North" (twelve writings each paired with a Major Arcana by Luis Royo)

"II. The Chariot"

A career on the razor's edge. A quartet of daring tightrope walkers managed to travel a long and narrow path with unwavering determination, resisting easy compromises and tempting influences. It would certainly be delightful to compose such an ode and launch into solemn epinicia, singing the glory of the divine Anekdoten, almost as if to curry favor with a tyrant, carefully crafting and decorating with flattery a truth that tells us another story instead. In his ode to Hieron of Syracuse, Pindar wrote that "many are the wonders and often the legend of mortals goes beyond the truth" and we, therefore, referring to the Swedish band, can only acknowledge a slow but undeniable decline, which had already begun in the wake of the "Morte Macabre" project, in which Nicklas Berg, reinterpreting ancient horror themes, unleashed nightmares and obsessions that he was then unable to control and adequately reintegrate into the highly effective yet improvable context of "Vemod".

Indeed, if I had to choose a truly distinctive and decisive strength of the formula adopted by the four musicians, I would undoubtedly highlight that extraordinary balance between smothered frustration and wild fervor that reaches in "Nucleus" levels nothing short of miraculous and it is for this reason that I would like to dwell on this unrepeatable album, observed from the sparse yet still suggestive dark ambient chasms of "From Within" and only dreamed of by dignified and relatively interesting products like "Gravity" and "A Time of Day," which nonetheless remain well above average in the most oppressive and aggressive progressive scene, tainted by predictable metal intrusions as tiresome as they are contrived.

The first time I glimpsed "Harvest" among the titles of this disk, released in 1995, I immediately imagined a hypothetical "agricultural" continuation of "Tempo della Semina" by Biglietto per l'Inferno, thinking particularly of the obsessive anxieties of Claudio Canali and comparing them to the resigned laments of Nicklas, more cryptic and excessively metaphysical to accommodate the messages of social denunciation of texts such as "Vivi Lotta Pensa" or "L'Arte Sublime di un Giusto Regnare". The suffocating hermeticism of the verses seems to find liberation only in the primordial fury of the guitar that, like a chariot drawn by the steeds of a sadistic conductor, overwhelms and devastates everything in its imperious passage ("Harvest"), heralded by the tumults of Jan Erik Liljeström's bass, heavy and granitic as an immense stone golem ("Nucleus", "Rubankh").

The silences, brief and uncertain, when not infested by abstract and chilling presences ("Raft"), are broken by the regular cadence of notes too similar to droplets of blood not to swell a river now determined to swallow up in its formidable flow, through angry waves of mellotron, the desperate drums of Peter Nordins, forced into harsh and impulsive turns ("Book of Hours"), retracing scarlet odysseys that occurred in English waters more than two decades ago ("This Far from the Sky"). Along the shore, the cello of Anna Sofi Dahlberg drags in a slow and agonizing march dictated by an uncontrollable suicidal frenzy ("Here"), finally mitigated by the faint hope conveyed by the bittersweet violin of Helena Killander ("In Freedom"), which nevertheless fails to prevent the impalpable delusions of a universal requiem, a prelude to the alienating deserts of the third and last work of the most visceral and expressive Anekdoten ("Luna Surface").

After the storm remains the amazement, the incredulity of having survived in the eye of a massive cyclone, a true "nucleus" of currents that will no longer manage to coexist in such a daring and violent spiral, setting like the legendary Typhoon, sealed by Zeus in the depths of the Italian underworld, not before leaving an indelible mark of its existence in the history of a world that, likewise, will not be able to forget the exploits of the heroes of musical progressive mythologies, still far from being fully written or understood to the fullest.