Amenra – Mass V

Like I said in the live report I did about three months ago on their latest show in Athens, Belgians Amenra deliver pain in all its possible forms and they seem to live with it, they carry it as a heavy burden on their backs and they continue living their lives like it’s never gonna let them loose. Also, being from Belgium, a country that we the Greeks mostly think of as a balanced one, we can only imagine which are the causes that have lead them to play such self-punishing and crawling music through the years. We may never find the answer but in ”Mass V” we found the most emotional and mind-burning album of the year 2012.

Amenra without a possible opponent, play like there’s no tomorrow, they play looking at the mirror and the only thing they see is the hollow images of what they call ‘themselves’. The truth is hard to cope and punishing to deal with. The fact that they toured with Neurosis and they signed to their record company didn’t manage to cleanse them but it is more likely to have damaged their self-conscious even more. Stripped inside of any possible elements of hope, they make their sound sound so bleak, repentant, crawling and apocalyptic as they have never done before in their ten year short history.

Four tracks only which last a little more than forty minutes. Believe me, they are more than enough to show you all the aspects of a traumatized form of expression. Vocalist Colin H. Van Eeckhout is the leading knife stabbed in your heart during the listening of ”Mass V”. The guy who sings with his back on the crowd during the gigs, a person who seems to be filled with denial until the last vein in his organism, screams his guts out like his liver is going to come out of him and die a painful death on its own. This is much to cope with as a listener, even if you have passed this test numerous times before with other similar bands.

Amenra are so great not because they play music that few could dare even thinking of, but mainly because they succeed in passing their message through very simplified and slow rhythms. Even when they dare give an extra strength to their crushing riffs, the result is always the same. I am a very positive person in general, maybe that’s why this band is so special for me, as it creates something so oppositional to myself that I can’t help but admitting there are more to life compared to what I see and how I choose to live it. Not all of us are the same and surely not all of us think in the same way.

The five-piece really left me astonished. All their previous works (three full-lengths, three EP’s and six splits) made me a big fan of them, but the latest live EXPERIENCE and this amazing album have made me an Amenra die-hard. If we put in place the emotions created during the listening of ”Mass V”, the Neurosis aura on the album (Scott Kelly does some extra vocals on last track ”Nowena I 9.10”) and the fact that something so simply played creates a pain in the chest and a weight in the heart, then this album makes me declare it the best of the year, a little before 2012 leaves us for good. This is pure catharsis!