Hey there, tech fiends. It's that time of the week again. Before we dive into today's focus, here's the usual weekly reminder that if you're looking for even more sick bands to hear, all prior editions of this series can be perused here.
At the beginning of the year, I usually tend to focus on leftover efforts from the year before that I really liked but didn't get to yet. I guess we're going to change that up for now, as Anna Pest from Montreal dropped a pretty amazing album on January 1st called Dark Arms Reach Skyward With Bone White Fingers.
I'll admit I was completely new to Anna Pest when one of my friends on Facebook shared one of the early singles from Dark Arms Reach Skyward With Bone White Fingers before it dropped on January 1st. I was fairly sure from hearing one early song that this would be a fucking amazing release, and, I wasn't disappointed. If you know me and my preferences, the less conventional and unorthodox the better, all of which Anna Pest does exceedingly well.
The project and this release were presented to me by its sole member, April Hutchins, in a social media post as being "For Fans Of: Cattle Decapitation, Discordance Axis, Aborted, Benighted, Fuck the Facts, The Red Chord, Cryptopsy, Cephalic Carnage, and Neon Genesis Evangelion." Outside of my love for anime like Neon Genesis Evangelion, a list like that is either something that is specific and true or stated to make people click without being true. I'm pretty hyped that it is an accurate indicator of the wide-spanning depths of the music found within Anna Pest – Dark Arms Reach Skyward With Bone White Fingers.
At the end of the day, I probably won't ever tire of traditional tech-death, but, I'll also continue to find myself more hyped about stuff that doesn't conform to the genre norms and really goes for an outsider's take on the style. For that reason, Anna Pest – Dark Arms Reach Skyward With Bone White Fingers, is a serious contender quality-wise as something that will likely be on my end of 2021 year-end best-of list for tech-death. If you haven't heard the album yet, it's embedded for you below. You can order it via Bandcamp and follow the project over on Facebook.
