With a band like Anaal Nathrakh, it’s not just the music that dictates how a song will progress but the effect of the language itself. Not satisfied sticking solely to their native language, songs skip through a variety of different languages including Latin, French and German. It’s not just the source of the inspiration that informs these decisions as Dave Hunt goes on to explain:
“I think using other languages is interesting in a few different ways. First of all, another language has a different atmosphere to it. If you say ‘I’m going down the shops’ in Latin it will sound a lot less mundane, it will sound like it has gravity to it. If you say things in Latin, I think it has an atmosphere to it, and that goes for several other languages as well, the harshness to parts of German for example. Also sometimes when we’re using different languages its kind of a pointer to the inspiration for the song, the origins behind it. We had a song partly in French and partly in Latin and that was because it was taken from a book I was reading about a guy called Schopenhauer and that’s what he’d written down in his diary when he was about 14 or 15, sort of a nod to the origins of the phrase. I also think that language is interesting itself, ways of expressing things. I just like messing about with language.”
Language and lyrics may inform the sound of the album, but when it comes to the booklet they are not in the habit of releasing these lyrics in print, however one exception to this rule exists. Passion’s ‘Tod Huetet Uebel’ remains the only song throughout their discography with lyrics officially printed. While it may be tempting to hunt for deeper meaning, it really comes down to a solid respect for the other musicians they work with.
“We spoke to a guy who we got to do some guest singing on that album, we quite often use guests just to add a little bit of interest and to acknowledge that we’re fans of them. He actually is German, Rainer his name is. Before he would agree to do it he asked us to convince him that it was something he could get behind so I sent him a load of potential lyrics, not that he should necessarily use them because if were going to have a guest we want them to do what they want to do, but sort of what I had in mind for the song and the idea behind it. He then wrote some extra lyrics, used some of my original ones and then came up with this title he wanted to use. As we’d worked together on it in a way we wouldn’t normally do and because he quite liked the idea of publishing the lyrics that was the one time we put the lyrics in the booklet for the album.”
Choosing these fellow musicians also remains a very simple process. “We just think who would be cool, usually it’s someone whose music we are fans of in the first place. For example, we’ve had Shane from Napalm Death, played live actually at a festival for us back in our early days and Rainer who I just spoke about, we really liked some stuff he did with Bethlehem a few years ago and on the new album we’ve got Niklas Kvarforth (Shining). We just got to know him and had a good time talking to him, he was a fan of our band. It’s really its an organic choosing process as you can imagine really, we just think who we’d like ourselves and ask.”
CAITLIN SMITH