Anathema - The Optimist

I wrote about Anathema a while ago regarding the comparison to and my slightly greater preference for Katatonia, and I mentioned Weather Systems being the best album between both bands (in my eyes of course). On Weather Systems Anathema really made a cohesive, emotionally dynamic album whose transitions to and from a variety of ethereal soundscapes were additive and fluid. Despite all contributing to the overall elevation of the soul the album provides, each song has a strong identity and a specific purpose in the tracklist. 2014’s Distant Satellites, while still a rather enjoyable album, lacked a lot of the cohesiveness that Weather Systems had, and to a degree felt like an unplanned continuation of that album’s trajectory, with a lot of songs that seemed to imitate the previous album without adding a whole lot new to the mix. It almost felt like groomed up leftovers from Weather Systems; like Anathema didn’t quite know what to do after Weather Systems. When Anathema announced that The Optimist was going to be a continuation of the vague storyline of A Fine Day to Exit, it sounded a bit to me, again, like they had had trouble deciding what to do next, so they sought inspiration from an old album (a barely decent one in my book) in hopes of finding a core feeling or concept to connect to in order to guide their music. And with The Optimist, this problem is clearly audible. I felt like with this very un-explicit concept album I could hear a struggle to gravitate toward this unclear concept about optimism and trying to express it in a primarily ambient, rather than lyrical, manner. While not much of Weather Systems was very lyrically mind-blowing or direct, the cathartic journey it takes its listeners is accomplished with a vast array of moods and shifts in instrumentation that keep the listener focused just as much as they help the listener meditate in the atmosphere it cultivates. The Optimist, on the other hand, seems to have a single emotional goal in mind, which it has a hard time reaching. Additionally, the album seems to suffer to a greater degree from the same problem Distant Satellites did: trying to duplicate the sonic glory of Weather Systems. If parts of Distant Satellites truly were scraps from Weather Systems, then that album licked them all up, because this album just seems to be trying to do another imitation from scratch and sounds like Anathema as a late-career formula. I’ll say, the album has grown on me, and I acknowledge that not loving it has been due in part to the difficulty of separating it from my favorite Anathema album (which this new one doesn’t make very easy); the song “Ghosts” is pretty enjoyable and sounds like it could possibly stand shoulder to shoulder with some of the songs on the past two albums. While it’s not as great as creating an immersive experience as its two immediate predecessors, it does create a relaxing and at least somewhat genuinely uplifting atmosphere, which I can’t get mad at the band about.