Name: De Doorn
Brand: Amenra

Bonus disc

Bonus disc: No

Catalogue number

RR74801

{"blocks": [{"data": {"text": "RR74801"}, "type": "paragraph"}]}

Colour

Black

Colour details

Discogs ID

Format multiplier

Download code

Download code: No

Rough Trade Exclusive

Rough Trade Exclusive: No

Extended format

Extended format: No

Format detail

Format Music US

Limited edition

Release date

2021-06-25

Signed copies

Signed copies: No

Supplier US

Orchard

Tax rate US

Sales:8.875

UPC / Barcode

781676748013

{"blocks": [{"data": {"text": "781676748013"}, "type": "paragraph"}]}

Total Cap

2 / Extended format: No / LP / Rough Trade Exclusive: No / Signed copies: No / black

Artist

Amenra

Genre US

Metal

Label US

RELAPSE

Amenra is a Belgian atmospheric sludge metal band that was formed in 1999 in Western Flanders. The band was created by three former members of the Belgian metalcore/hardcore/death metal band Spineless, namely Colin Van Eeckhout, Mathieu Vandekerckhove, and Kristof Mondy. Since their formation, Amenra has been known for their powerful and intense performances.

The current lineup of Amenra consists of Mathieu J. Vandekerckhove on guitars, Colin H. Van Eeckhout on vocals, Bjorn J. Lebon on drums, Lennart Bossu on guitars, and Tim De Gieter on bass. Over the years, they have also had several talented musicians as part of their lineup including Vincent F. Tetaert and Maarten P. Kinet.

Amenra's music can be described as atmospheric sludge metal with influences from various genres such as post-metal and hardcore punk. Their sound is characterized by heavy guitar riffs, intense vocals, and emotionally charged lyrics. Fans of bands like Year Of No Light, Cult Of Luna, and Neurosis will find similarities in Amenra's music.

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 recognizes the path traveled 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.

De Doorn

Music US

Buy Amenra - De Doorn (Vinyl, CD) now from Rough Trade - independent purveyors of great music, since 1976.