Reviews
2002-10-28
ANTIMATTER ,unlike their name, are not exactly the essence of the negative matter in the universe but they do possess the dark energy from the depth of black holes of the soul. "saviour" enraptures the listener into Duncan Patterson (Anathemas ex bass player) and Michael Mosses inner universe through mental nebulas and psychotic novas. Patterson and Moss both play on guitars, keyboards and bass and use every trick in the book in order to create that floating, ambient feeling but keep the heavier goth motives via melancholic strings (beautifully synthesized), Operatic vocals, heavy guitars or hard drum n' base parts.
The credit for the more mellow dub, ambient atmosphere is granted to Michelle Richfield (Sear & Dominions first album) and Hayley Windsor (Drug Free America) with far-away, soft, haunting singing and Les "lector" Smith (Cradle of Filth ex keyboardist and the current Anathema keyboardist) with Brian Mosses soft, electronic beat samples.
The interesting thing in a relatively calm electronic album made by metalists (or ex metalists) is that if you played metal (especially gothic and black) you cant just give up on the strength and the darker parts so what happens is that a track can starts as quite trip hop and then suddenly it would brake into a gothic strings part and straight to a hard Wumpscut style industrial ("god is coming"), another example would be "Flowers" that has a nice baroque sound and just as you start to drift off comes a part that sounds like one of Cradles straight-from-hell keyboards passages that hadn't found an album until now.
Or an opposite example - "psalms" - that starts with gothic strings holding those distant dissonant chords and surprises you with a Portishead style optimistic chorus.
ANTIMATTER Presents an interesting and unique blend of styles and creates an album that will in your stereo for a long time. I can not really define this very special style.
Duncan Patterson describes it as: "experimental dark orchestral ambient electronic dub with female vocals". In 4 words I would have described it as: Portishead for bad kids".
Tal Galfsky
