Album Review: Anchoress — 'Sugarsong'

<a href="https://anchoress2.bandcamp.com/album/sugarsong">Sugarsong by Anchoress.</a>

Iowa has been the birthplace of some incredible heavy music acts. Marshalltown’s Modern Life Is War are melodic hardcore royalty. Iowa City wrought Aseethe and their punishing doom metal and Dryad with their outstanding crusty black metal. Out of Dubuque, Telekinetic Yeti make stoned doom metal. Muscatine’s Closet Witch, by all rights, should be a world-class grindcore band. Druids are like Mastodon, but from Des Moines, and somewhere along the way, after Truth & Janey but before Pit Lord, some masked dudes made an impact on the entire heavy metal world.

There is a great variety of heavy music from the Hawkeye State, and that variety is worth mentioning, because Ames’ Anchoress is not an easy band to define. Their latest EP, Sugarsong (released on July 26) may be only four songs, but they pack those songs with a grain silo full of ideas. “Coveter” opens with a post-hardcore inspired passage, but throughout the song they achieve Chat Pile-flavored sludge as easily as they flip into Dillinger Escape Plan indebted mathcore.

“Death At An Early Age” has a more punk feel to it, but those low bass tones and intense guitars soon give way to a gently melodic part with layered spoken word vocals that calls to mind Slint. The payoff is as heavy as a tractor wheel comeback that maintains a high-level intensity even as the tempos change for the latter half of the song. Field recordings of frogs and crickets and a dog barking take us out of the heavy barrage into a sense of unease. That unease is well deserved as the frenetic “Figure Skating For Monster Trucks” launches the listener into a hardcore punk stratosphere, betrayed by flipping into a Pelican-style post-rock series of instrumental wizardry that dances across so many reference points that trying to compare it to other acts would be pointless. It is fun as hell, and you should experience it yourself.

These three tracks all build to the monumental closing track. “Sugarsong” approaches 11 minutes, but this added breathing room gives Anchoress time to spread their wings and explore their wide-ranging creativity, creating a kind of post-hardcore prog in the process. (Post-progcore?) Regardless of genre titles, the song contains a spoken word reading of Walt Whitman’s “Song Of Myself” that resonates deeply in a punk setting, but even more so in the context of a public indifferent to the growing authoritarianism that surrounds us. Why wouldn’t we look to nature, to animals, to catch a glimpse of ourselves, if nothing else but to give us resolve against a world that has forgotten the golden rule?

Isn’t that sweet? Anchoress has given us a lot to chew on in such a short release, and if it is any indication of what could come from this young band, Iowa is soon to have another name in our heavy music hall of fame.