Philip H. Anselmo & The Illegals - Choosing Mental Illness as a Virtue

With yet another assembly of musicians, Phil has returned to his venture into retro death metal with “The Illegals” to showcase his vocal prowess in a very raw and filthy fashion, and he certainly shows himself competent at the very least in the style, a testament to his lasting vocal abilities and his continued stylistic ambition. He occasionally slinks back into the black metal rasp he’s made great use of with Scour, but for the most part his extra growled and pissed off take on the vocals he made great use of with Pantera and this project’s debut hover mesh well with the similarly nasty primal death metal his bandmates play beneath him. Rather than indulging in comic book descriptions of gore and disaster, Phil takes direct aim at real-life groups of people, with a convincingly furious attitude, which is a kind of refreshing take for the genre.

While there is a lot of raw and nasty death metal out there, the nastiness found on this album borders on the very rough. With age slowly closing in on Phil, his pushing of his narrowing vocal boundaries sounds more strained than before and less clinically executed. These qualities bring to mind Chris Barnes’ infamous work with Six Feet Under. Whereas Chris’ far-over-the-hill pipes are a lazily performed nuisance atop similarly lazy instrumentals, the sense of struggle in Phil’s voice on this album is actually enhancing, making the performances sound more genuine and his anger more real, a hard feat to achieve in a genre with many subsets saturated with anger.

“Little Fucking Heroes” kicks the album off with a visceral stab at armchair activism in dirty, abrasive death metal fashion. From the get go, the band show themselves to be experienced in the sound and proficient in drawing up an attention-holding piece with seemingly ugly and chaotic sounds. The following track, “Utopian”, maintains the grip on chaos, with Phil’s black metal vocals sounding utterly abysmal, but the ups and downs the guitars and the vocals go through is pretty enthralling. The semi-titular track offers but a second’s breath before breaking into a tumult of fast and slow instrumentation and psychotic, existential lyrics. Phil’s use of “catharsis” in the closing lyrics of “The Ignorant Point” could be taken as a jab at the very public criticism toward Phil by Robb Flynn (whose album, Catharsis, with Machine Head came out the same day as Phil’s). The maddened shouting on “Delinquent” and “Individual” showcase the additive power of Phil’s gruff, raw vocal performances. “Finger Me”, perhaps contains some of the most gnarly and stand-offish, Pantera-esque attitude with Phil using his more familiar vocal technique to make his position clear to whoever he’s telling to fuck off. “Mixed Lunatic Results” finishes the album off with deep-toned pummeling of the drums and low-hovering tremolo picking that eventually concludes with vertigo-effected guitars and the pounding of drums resembling a headache that follows a ruthless street brawl.

I imagine this album is not going to be for everyone, however. For those who like their death metal computer-technical and/or über-produced, Phil’s hacking black metal gags, full-breath shouts, and his band’s semi-lo-fi controlled crashing are going to be a turn-off. Phil and company opted for sheer, unfiltered aggression over fine-tuning and polishing on their second outing and it mostly paid off. While there are hardly any tasty grooves and riff-laden hooks to be found on the album, their absence is a result of the wild explosiveness smothering the album leaving very little room for the conventional riff or lick. It’s an album meant more for the cultivated atmosphere of unhinged anger than for sitting down and analyzing or listening for nuances. Not to say the chaos is not layered, but the album clearly beckons more in-the-moment indulgence in the violence than it does careful listening and dissection. Like the cover, the album’s sound is more of a collage of insanity than a highly intentional diagram of it.