Albums You Probably Haven't Heard Yet: Annwyn, Beneath the Waves (1996)

A swirling dark tapestry of mad pretentions, this may be my favorite album of all time. Although the band Faith and the Muse has arguably recorded better albums - The Burning Season is probably their best - Annwyn sings to my soul in ways that no other album, before or since, has done.

Released in mid-1996, Annwyn grabbed me like a spectral barbarian, heaved me through the nearest wall, gathered me up in pale-skinned beauty, fucked me senseless, and danced with me till dawn. If that sounds overripe, so does the album. Annwyn may be the perfect blend of bombastic Pagan theatrics, graceful poetry and blissfully romantic rock. Produced by two seasoned veterans of the Punk and Gothic scenes, this album sounds still packs, for me, the same punch it had over a decade ago. How so? Let's see...

My fondness for the Dark Romantic aesthetic runs through almost everything I adore and create. Rooted in a youth filled with old horror movies, horror comics, Edgar Allen Poe, and books about all three (thanks, Dad!) - not to mention a collection of little plastic knights and old Aurora monster model kits - my natural penchant for morbid bygone beauty got an addition kick in the ass when I encountered Jethro Tull's music during their neo-minstrel period in the mid-70s, not to mention The Lord of the Rings. (Again, thanks, Dad!) Gothic horror and romantic medievalism combined into a heady brew of towering castles, dark deeds and heaving-chested maidens. By the time the late '70s added Dungeons & Dragons, Conan the Barbarian and Heavy Metal (both magazine and music genre) to that mix, I was ripe for the theatrical bombast of the Gothic Rock movement.

Sadly, the Gothic Rock movement (and its attendant subculture) really didn't exist at that point. Outside a few bars in London, Berlin, San Francisco and New York, the "goth thing" didn't really find its feet in the States until the mid-1980s. By that time, I had dived literally into Punk and - paradoxically - the budding Celtic Rock and New Age genres, deepening my Pagan sensibilities with lots of barefoot wenches and boffer-weapon madness via the RenFaire/ SCA scene. The counterpart to my poofy-shirt persona was my biker jacketed fondness for moshpits and Ramonian hijinks. These things seemed, at the time, incompatible(*). In college, the only person I knew who listened to The Cure and Joy Division was a pompous asshole(**). So even though I went to art school in the mid-1980s, loved The Hunger, and listened to Bauhuas and The Cult, I pretty much missed "the goth thing" until it had already been established.

Jeeze, what about the album, dude?

I'm getting to that.

Fast forward to the early 1990s. Post-collegiate "reality" has set in, along with poverty, crushing student loans, and a bi-polar wife. Aside from some brief stints playing bass in a variety of bands, not much fun to be had. Drawn down into a darkening spiral of shitty jobs and domestic misery, my own Muse kicked into overdrive. I started writing stories, started getting them published, and - in 1992 - scored a gig writing for White Wolf Games. The doors to that Spooky Dark Castle on my horizon opened for me at last. Alongside my college-era friends Bill Bridges and Dan and Andrew Greenberg, I took to "the goth thing" instantly. Hey, better late than never!



I first encountered Faith and the Muse on their debut run with the Procession Tour in 1994. Honestly, I wasn't impressed. Their set got sandwiched in between French Bauhuas clones Corpus Delecti and the bizarre German antics of Das Ich; the sound quality was awful, and their set list seemed monotonous. I guessed at the time that FatM sounded better in the studio than in concert, so although they had a lovely T-shirt, I pretty much forgot about them for about a year-and-a-half.

"Have you heard of Faith and the Muse?" my friend Michael asked me. I told him about Procession, and he replied, "You HAVE to hear this!" He lent me the copy of Annwyn he'd bought at a concert the night before. I took it home that evening.

Holy.
Fucking.
Shit.

Be advised: If and when you hear Annwyn, turn the sound up loud and leave it there.

The fun begins with a growling swoop into the Abyss. A sweeping sludge-guitar howl dives headfirst into a dreamscape of furious passion. The implacable title cut dovetails into a thundering invocation with the second track, then bursts into earth-shaking war-drums with the third track, "Cantus." By the time Annwyn takes a breather on tis fourth cut, the Old Gods have risen again. The album pours across dark phantasmal landscapes like The Wild Hunt on crack. By the final dismissal - a ghostly blast of staticy voices called "Apparition" - Annwyn has performed a baroque ritual of sound and fury, signifying lots.

Inspired by the Welsh Mabinogeon saga, classic poetry, postmodern Paganism and an overall disgust with modern Man, Annwyn weaves a dark romantic spell. Yet despite the presence of hammer dulcimer and lyrics by Goethe, there's nothing prissy about this album. William Faith and "Muse" Monica Richards are veterans of the '80s American Punk scene, and it shows. Gorgeously thick production (with all instrumentation performed by Faith and Richards) piles layer after layer of sound upon each element. Yes, it's a ripe concoction of Pagan propaganda, but the sheer beauty of its approach keeps Annwyn from lapsing into the ponderous silliness of, say, Inkubus Sukkubus or - Gods help us! - Manowar. The overall style is a fusion of Metal, Punk, Celtic Rock and Gothic Ethereal. I'd lay odds that Evanescence listened this album to death when they were kids - its influence is all over their sound.

So if you like your romance dark and beautiful, if you appreciate vast soundscapes of demon-haunted moors, if you're looking for background music to Kushiel's Chosen or a Sorcerers Crusade game(**), or even if - like me - you like giving underrated bands a try, check out Annwyn, Beneath the Waves. It might not be your favorite album ever, but it's bound to get under your skin.

TRACK LISTING

1. "Annwyn, Beneath the Waves"
2. "The Silver Circle"
3. "Cantus"
4. "The Dream of Macsen"
5. "Fade and Remain"
6. "Arianrhod"
7. "Branwen Slayne"
8. "Hob Y Derri Dando"
9. "Cernunnos"
10. "The Hand of Man"
11. "The Sea Angler"
12. "The Birds of Rhiannon"
13. "Rise and Forget"
14. "Apparition"

PERSONNEL

All voices and instrumentation performed by William Faith and Monica Richards. Album produced by Faith and the Muse and Chad Blinman.



----------------
* - Well, aside from the sparring I did on weekends with the guys who would later form Gwar, but that's another story.

** - I listened this album to death and beyond during the creation of Sorcerers Crusade.