Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
â Live Streamingâ Interactive Chatâ Private Showsâ HD Qualityâ Free Actions
Free to watch ⢠No registration required ⢠HD streaming
War metal seems to be having a moment, which should surprise no one who is paying attention, and we should note the long and unfortunate tradition of black metal bands possessed of worrisome interest in the phantoms of the 20th century World Wars, especially Teutonic impulses toward empire and genocide. Aeger Anima, solo black metal project of Jehan Fillat, is keenly interested in the Great War, but the projectâs historical markers suggest ideological orientations sharply different from those of Marduk, or even of 1914. The Falling Leaves sets to music two famous poems from World War I â Alan Seegerâs âI Have a Rendezvous with Deathâ and Wilfred Owenâs âDulce et Decorum Estâ â neither of which celebrates or glamorizes the muck, violence and abjection of the trenches.
Seeger and Owen belong to a canon of Modernist war poets that also includes Siegfried Sassoon and David Jones. The poets occupy a strange position, suspended between the innovations of the early-20th-century avant-gardes that attempted to reduce tradition to blasted ruins and the equally ambitious Heroic Modernists (like Joyce, Woolf and Dos Passos) who tried desperately to fit the fragments back into a semblance of meaningful order. Seeger and Owen had more tragic relations to blasts and fragments: Seeger was killed in action at the Somme in 1916, and Owen was killed in 1918, exactly a week before the armistice.
Owenâs poem is the more complex of the two, essentially a double sonnet exploded into four curiously formed stanzas. With all the retrospective logics we now apply to Modernism, the impulse is to discover an organizing principle in the poem that might recoup the idea of a whole. But the poem wonât be domesticated; the two-line stanza that sits isolated in the middle of the poem (âIn all my dreams before my helpless sight, / He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowningâ) is a trauma, a nightmare vision of mustard gas that canât be mastered. Fittingly, Aeger Animaâs song âDulce et Decorum Estâ is the best and most unsettling thing on the EP, keening and careening.
Fillatâs music skews close to some of the avant-garde black metal he released on his now-defunct label, Apathia Records (see Void Paradigmâs Earthâs Disease or Orakleâs Eclats). Aeger Anima churns and icily burns, occasional industrial elements suggesting machined surfaces and mechanized forms. Some of that wrong-foots the music; Fillatâs decision to repeat a sample of the word âdeathâ from David Lawrenceâs reading of âI Have a Rendezvous with Deathâ briefly devolves the song into silliness. It sounds a bit like bad EDM.
But the project couldnât be better timed. One doubts that Pete Hegseth listens to much black metal; someone might send him a download of Falling Leaves, but one also doubts that he would get it. The War Departmentâs participation in the aestheticization of official American politics puts this reviewer in the mind of some of the stupidest fulminations of the Italian Futurists, with their hypermasculine preening and their vapid praise for Mars and the machine gun. The rest of us should listen to Falling Leaves, read more Owen and Sassoon and remember just how ruthlessly horrific war is.
