Hello Metal Temple. Today I'm bringing to you the new ANASARCA "Survival Mode". It is far from being a memorable one. In their 22 years of existence, ANASARCA released only 4 full length album, and yet it doesn't feel like it's been worked on for years. The band from Germany took their name from an extreme form of edema and their lyrics talks about illnesses. Nothing to help I guess.

Musically, it makes some sort of sense except that there seems to be a lot of repetition and not a lot of progression in each song. It also feels like a 51 minute long song with so little variety in the vocals. With basically one note from start to finish, maybe with a peak or two in between.

Throughout the album the volume of the drum was so loud that I had trouble concentrating on anything else around it. It was also out of sync with the rest of the music in most songs of the album. If this was on purpose, it didn't yield the expected result since I wasn't able to appreciate the guitar solos because of this.

There are some theatrical cuts once in a while to put some emphasis on the story it tries to tell, but the story is hard to follow. Is it the story of vampires in "Drinking Blood" or cannibals in "Cannibal"? Maybe it is something else, unknown and lost in the lyrics. Or maybe they just put together a compilation of different threats. I'm unsure what to think at this point.

Don't get me wrong, they are great musicians with a passion. Maybe this is a niche kind of music that I'm not getting. I usually warm up to almost any bands after a few runs of a CD. But this time it didn't happen, I just couldn't get into it.