Review: Anarchÿ - Retching Necropolis

Style: Thrash metal, Progressive metal (mixed vocals)
Recommended for fans of: Voivod, Coroner, Havok
Review by: Francesco
Country: Missouri, United States
Release date: 23 May, 2023

Konnichiwa and welcome back to all my Japanese readers! Anarchÿ returns to the scene after last year’s debut full-length Sentience with an EP called Retching Necropolis. The St. Louis based duo (and their super cool robot drummer) bring back some of the classic Anarchÿ sounds, only in bite-size format this time around. Although lacking in 30+ minute opuses, there’s still a couple of bangers here to tide you over; Retching Necropolis delivers more of what you’ve come to love from Anarchy and their musical inclinations: technical wizardry, interesting compositional arrangements, and abrupt, absurdly titled short tracks.

I particularly enjoy the way that Anarchÿ transition within their songs to create different movements. In the opener “Blizzard and Brimstone” they start with slow acoustic guitars before the dissonant, fast-paced distorted parts kick in. “Chopin’s Nightmare” seamlessly breaks into an excerpt from Chopin‘s “Funeral March”. In the middle of “The Helix Withers” they bring out the reverberant acoustics again: first solo, and then with backing percussion, until the electric comes back playing something approximate to the acoustic bit. In this way they tend to eschew the traditional verse-chorus-bridge structure of most popular songwriting, and keep their compositions diverting and engaging.

Although Anarchÿ are often styled as neoclassical, I don’t really hear much of that influence in Necropolis beyond the last track, “Ÿ”, an 8-second grindcore rendition of Tchaikovsky‘s “Waltz of the Flowers” from The Nutcracker. The other short track on this is “Pantera’s Pizza: Ballad of the Hunk”: what could best be described as a musical stinger stuck at the end of a commercial. The last thing to mention about this EP is the inclusion of a cover of Acid Bath‘s “Bleed Me an Ocean”. It’s a pretty faithful rendition, but I’m not really one for sludge metal, and I often found myself skipping over it on subsequent listens. Probably better fitting for inclusion here rather than the upcoming full length.

Three original compositions and one cover song make for a short listen but I feel that punctuating with the aforementioned bumper music, as we heard in the last album, helps to keep a listener engaged as they go through the track listing. Retching Necropolis is a quick technical thrash metal degustation that serves to whet your appetite but leaves you hungry for another course.

Recommended tracks: The Helix Withers, Blizzard and Brimstone
You may also like: VENUS, Reverber, Quasarborn
Final verdict: 7/10