Thanatos Album Review

The initial guitar strings are like wind chimes hanging on the front porch. When the bass guitar steps in the big brass door opens and you enter into the world of Thanatos, the latest album from the shadow king, Amos/Anon. Shadows do not exist without light. And Amos/Anon is the ultimate dark/light dichotomy.

The apex of this opening instrumental track The Verge of Relapse is when the grunge surpasses everything else in the song and you are hurled around turbulently. It is seductively violent in its nature, it disturbs as it lures you in.

Scapegoat Mechanism is a signature Amos/Anon song. With whispering vocals overcast by heavy and gritty instruments, this style works so well in bottling the unheard voices lost in a world of deafening noise.

In Identified Patient the song encapsulates those who feel forsaken, anaesthetised and without hope. Amos/Anon isn’t deterred by the peripheries of society. In fact his home is there. He shares his stories in a frank and revealing way.

Unlike other artists who touch upon the morose topics of life, he does not glorify it. It is a strange way of describing it, but his music is ugly. It is not pretty. It is a beautiful mess. But a mess that a lot of people will be relate to.

Take Munchausen’s Syndrome. It is horrifying with its encroaching terror. The final lines of Apatheia are confrontational to say the least. But the beauty that arises from the work of Amos/Anon is the bold sincerity. This isn’t a retrospective on a dark time in someone’s life, an enlightened perspective of one’s journey. This is real and gritty and you need to suffer through it because that is the point of it. That is what it is like when you are in the grips of a haunted madness.

What he does provide is a personal account of someone who fights for every day. Here is an artist that is courageously battling against the melancholy, one chord at a time.

-Janise.