JC
You know what they say about the things that come to those who wait…
- MUSIC FOCUS: Ankor; Blaze The Trail.
- ACTIVITY FOCUS: Write your own review.
Ankor & Blaze The Trail @ Moth Club, London, 11th November 2023
The early winter darkness engulfs us. The November cold escalates. East London howls. We shove at the Moth Club’s front door and it swings open. Inside, the metamorphic Blaze The Trail are showing everyone how to be a brilliant metalcore band. As fevered as they are furious, they’re a lot of fun too; by the time they crash to a conclusion, there are guitarists on tables, the singer is crowdsurfing – and everyone watching has found a new band to fall in love with.
Enter Ankor. For the first time ever on a UK stage. How has it taken so long? The Spanish outfit’s music is a whirlwind of neon melodies and stormy heaviness – and the luminescent impact of it is impossible to deny. Sure, their set might be bookended by the ash-strewn ‘Lost Soul’ and ‘Prisoner’, but the group’s sometimes apocalyptic imagery never equates to a lack of dreaminess; there’s an indomitabilty to the quintet’s songwriting that feels motivated – rather than defined – by life’s blackness.
The band’s ability to find escape hatches in the horror is underlined time and time again: by the frantically flashing lights that accompany ‘Darkbeat’ and turn this old social centre into an underground dance club; by the spiralling ‘Interstellar; by the glimmering ‘Oblivion’. Somehow, Ankor chew up any gloominess, before – like emotional alchemists – recycling it in the form of neon melodies and fluttering feelings of hopefulness. Listening to their music is like growing wings.
It might have taken Ankor nearly a decade (and that’s not counting the years before Jessie Williams took over on lead vocals) to make it to London, but maybe now the city can at last cease its howling. Because, even as the group leave the stage, and we throw ourselves once more into the jaws of winter, we know this obsidian night will not last forever. Ankor have given us a glimpse of the future, and it’s kaleidiscopic.
ACTIVITY 1
At the end of 2022, we compiled our list of the year’s best albums and spent some time with the 20 words we wanted to then try using in our day-to-day writing. The vocab list is below (words in orange have been used in the Ankor live review).
Try writing your own review of a favourite record or show. Make use of at least a few of the listed words.
ACTIVITY 2
Write a short story inspired by space or any of the other themes at the heart of Ankor’s own music. Make use of at least a few of the listed words.
- luminescent (glowing)
- kaleidoscopic (multicoloured)
- poignant (bringing to mind a sense of sadness or regret)
- metamorphic (changed into a new form by great heat and pressure)
- sonorous (deep and full)
- indomitable (impossible to defeat)
- fevered (excessive nervous energy)
- ephemeral (lasting for a very short time)
- resolute (determined)
- illimitable (endless)
- balletic (graceful)
- anomalous (different to normal)
- murmurous (low, indistinct)
- empyrean (heavenly)
- leaden (heavy; of the colour of grey)
- wistful (sad about something past)
- calescent (growing warm; increasing in heat)
- ineffable (too great for words)
- rhapsodic (extravagantly emotional)
- ethereal (extremely delicate and light in a way that seems not to be of this world)
Now, let To Kill Achilles lead you through a lesson in light/dark imagery!
And do send your work in! We want to publish the most exciting writing!