AMENRA’s first release for Relapse Records is at once a departure and
a momentous act of deliverance. Stepping outside the run of albums
titled Mass I-VI, De Doorn casts a 21-year journey from the heart of
Belgium’s crusading hardcore scene to world-renowned, spiritually guided
innovators in an enthralling new light.
Ritual, remembrance and
hard-won rebirth have always been at the heart of Amenra’s colossal,
soul-purging approach. Centered around frontman Colin H. Van Eeckhout,
but marked out by a transcendent unity of purpose, their albums have
acted as totemic, personal marker points, a means to process individual
grief as a shared, cathartic experience. Their live shows are acts of
incendiary, communal exorcism that reach a cusp of sublime, out-of-body
experience. A closely knit collective, they transport you to a febrile
state where confrontation of pain, transformation and true healing can
occur.
AMENRA have always been profoundly bound to their
hometowns around Flanders, the weight of that area’s war-torn history.
The sacrifice and sense of a larger purpose that bridges the fragility
of humanity and the pull of an immaculate ideal is carried as an
ever-present resonance. No more is this apparent than in the
spectacular, commemorative events the band have performed in recent
years – to mark ending of the First World War; the band’s 20th
anniversary; and the departure of long-time band member Levy Seynaeve.
At the SMAK Museum Of Contemporary Art in Ghent’s 19th-century,
monument-strewn Citadelpark in May 2019, they offered a communal
recognition of loss and letting go. Here, audience members were invited
to make their own offerings, placing personal notes of acknowledgment in
wooden structures created by Indonesian artist Toni Kanwa Adikusumah,
before they were brought out into the park and set alight as an act of
recognition and release – a forging of hope from the flames.
Written
for the purpose of that rite, De Doorn (‘The Thorn’) occupies a place
between AMENRA’s recorded and live work, less a testimony to the band’s
individual bereavements, more an invitation for others to come forward,
and to pass through darkness into light. Where the Mass albums have
taken the form of solitary struggles whose fearless honesty has aligned
itself to the most intrinsically human of chords, the dynamics of De
Doorn are as stricken by destiny as ever, but sonically looser. Guided
to a lesser extent by the band’s characteristically immense,
behind-the-beat traction, it’s more lush, immersive, steeped in
sonorous, cathedral-echo ambiences amplified to the point of
static-infected instability and carrying passages of deeply intimate
spoken-word that feel like being drawn in to the most hallowed of
confidences. Its themes of dialogue and the passing of knowledge are
echoed in the combined vocals of Colin and Oathbreaker’s Caro Tanghe.
Her spectral presence on the opening Ogentroost acts as both
counterpoint and complement to Colin’s stricken howl as the song cycles
between enervation and helplessly compelled momentum. Their whispered
devotions in the following, vast, hallowed atmospheres of De Dood In
Bloei leave you feeling as though you’re bearing witness to the most
private of conversations.
The first AMENRA album to be sung
entirely in Flemish, De Doorn imparts a universal power by digging deep
into local customs. Not just allowing for a greater range of expression
through the intimacy, allowances and layers of meaning granted by your
native tongue, it takes inspiration from Flemish forms such as
Kleinkunst, a folk-based musical wave driven by storytelling, and the
passing of wisdom through generations. Yet as with every AMENRA release,
De Doorn is an act of observance that recognises the path travelled by
fully experiencing the moment, as a rite of consummation, reckoning and
deliverance. That state of transition is exemplified in the closing Vor
Immer, a hushed, plaintively wracked coda that bursts into newborn,
world-in-your eyes transfiguration where sheer, sense flooding
experience becomes a blazing threshold where rupture and rapture become
one.
The thorn is the most potent of symbols – in religious
terms, a reclamation and an agony as a mark of transformation. It’s the
nagging reminder of vulnerability and it’s the violent protector,
without which beauty cannot thrive. For the cover of De Doorn, it’s been
cast in bronze – a thing of value and a memorial, each band member
given their own piece to symbolise their own pain and their belonging to
the greater whole. In bronze, it is both nature and something else – a
mark of singularity and a portal to a continuity that we all share. As
AMENRA have acknowledged once more, it’s one that hears our call, even
when we feel we are at our most alone.
CD.