Photo by Shimon
In August, after an eight-year hiatus, Canadian band Anciients released their new full length, Beyond the Reach of the Sun. More remarkable still, it’s one of the best albums of the year. It’s a monument to the breakthroughs of the 2010s, when heavy, progressive music surged in popularity. It wears its influences on its sleeve: the lush, incisive melodic thrust of Baroness’ riffs; the fluidity and sustain of Opeth’s soloing; and the off-beat creativity of Gojira’s drum patterns. It’s all woven together by Kenny Cook’s warm, soulful singing voice, alternating with his guttural roars.
It hasn’t been an easy road for Cook. After their last album was recorded, Voice of the Void, Cook became a father. But his wife ended up having heart complications, and almost died. With a newborn son and recuperating wife to look after, Cook was largely unable to tour the album. In January 2017, songwriting partner and fellow guitarist Chris Dyck left the band on amicable terms (“nothing to do with any internal bullshit,” Dyck said in a statement). Nevertheless, it was another setback. The album went on to win a JUNO award (the Canadian equivalent of a GRAMMY) for Heavy Metal Album of the Year in 2018. But then came COVID, and Anciients were rocked back on their heels once again.
But now, Anciients, who drew substantial heat with their 2013 debut, Heart of Oak, and subsequent tours with High on Fire and Lamb of God, have returned with their best work yet. Epic in scope, Beyond the Reach of the Sun, is a product of the dark times, shining brightly from the northern lands of British Columbia.
“We're at the point right now where we almost feel as though we're like a new band,” says Cook. “And we've had a fire lit under our asses now, and it's kind of exciting again.”
Cook and his family are based in the rural Columbia-Shuswap district, about a four-hour drive east from his band mates in Vancouver. For the first time, he has an outbuilding where he can write music and “sound horrible all by myself”. His son is now nine and the troubled early days of family life have passed.
Remoteness has suited Cook’s songwriting. There’s nothing that can replace the magic of working through musical ideas in a jam room, but he doesn’t miss driving an hour each way to practice twice a week after work. Being burnt out isn’t great for creativity. Now, he can live up to his surname and let musical ideas “simmer”, sharing them online with guitarist Brock MacInnes, bassist Rory O’Brien and drummer Mike Hannay.
“I've been able to get out of the rat race, the big city,” says Cook. “I'm surrounded by mountains and a lake now, and my nearest neighbor probably couldn't hear me if I was yelling at the top of my lungs, right?”
Which is a good thing, because Cook can really yell. He used to share vocal duties with Dyck but has had to adapt to carrying the load on his own.
“Even with Chris, from the beginning [in 2009], I've always done 90% of the vocals,” explains Cook. “Typically, Chris would sing on the songs that he wrote. But in a live setting, he would definitely help out with making things a little more intense. I've always done both styles – the cleans and the growls. Mine are more, I don't know, raspy death metal. His were more caveman-ish!”
Dyck and Cook go back to the 2000s, and their first band Spread Eagle, which Cook describes as a “cock rock kind of band”. When Spread Eagle met its demise, Cook and Dyck, alongside original Anciients bassist Aaron Gustafson, did a “180 musically”. They stretched themselves and explored the outer reaches of their playing ability, hitting on a hefty and complex sound that first emerged on 2011 EP Snakebeard.
Cook has always been led by his musical instincts. It might be the death of him, he admits, but he has to see where a song leads him on the guitar before he attempts to sing over it.
“Sometimes it can be a real pain in the ass when you start trying to think of how you're going to sing over something that's not so easy to play in the first place,” he laughs.
But for Beyond the Reach of the Sun, Cook focused instead on honing his vocal melodies as well as growing and sharpening the hookier elements of the songwriting. The result is a host of mini-epics: from the precipitous contortions of “The Cloak of the Vast and Black” opening out to a trippy vista that recalls Gojira’s “Flying Whales”, to the spectral eeriness of “Is It Your God” erupting into keyboards reminiscent of prime Emerson, Lake and Palmer.
“I don't usually set out on a particular goal for a sound of how I want a record to be, but I felt like Voice of the Void, our last record, was pretty much a lot of crushing riffs, just constantly throughout,” says Cook. “There's obviously dynamics in those riffs. But for the most part, it was mostly kick-ass, crushing riffs. And so the one thing I wanted with this record was to feel a little bit more like a continuation of Heart of Oak, as opposed to full-out crushing again. More of a rock side with extreme metal elements kind of thing, right?”
The keyboards on the album were laid down by Justin Hagberg of Three Inches of Blood. He was originally enlisted to play keys on the album’s bonus track, a cover of The Alan Parsons Project’s “Some Other Time” – another flavor in the Anciients sound. Hagberg ended up contributing to half the album’s songs.
“I'm not a huge fan of the keyboard parts being super up front,” says Cook. “I enjoy some of it, but, say, [Yngwie] Malmsteen-esque or something, where it's just crazy, it's not really my thing. But we are lucky to have Justin. When I sent him the demos, he had really good taste as far as the sounds that he chose, and when and where to add things. They just add to the overall ambience of the song, as opposed to imposing the synthesizer’s will.”
A warning from progressive rock history: be careful when you’re challenging a synthesizer’s will!
Ultimately, the Anciients magic is in the blending. The challenge is to meld everything together so that it isn’t, in Cook’s words, “cut and dry”, or too abrupt. At forty years old, Cook began playing guitar with grunge as the soundtrack of his life (and there’s more of a little Alice In Chains to the clean vocals at times). As he grew older, Tool and Opeth delivered major albums, and the scene that Anciients came into was emerging – Mastodon, The Ocean, Intronaut, Kvelertak, Ancestors – music that was heavy as fuck, but wanted to surprise and delight its listeners.
One of the joys of Beyond the Reach of the Sun is how clearly its influences are signposted. Album opener “Forbidden Sanctuary” segues into a section that would have sat comfortably on Opeth’s 2003 masterpiece, Damnation. But it’s understandable if Cook finds my game of spot-the-inspiration a little irritating (he doesn’t show it either way).
“I never intentionally sit down and be like, OK, this has to sound like Opeth, or certain influences,” he says. “But when I first started this band, that was when I first started listening to Opeth. And I thought they were quite amazing, right? So at the very beginning [of the band], I was listening to quite a bit of it, so I can see how that stuff would weave its way in. And now I've been listening to that stuff for quite a while, so I think, subconsciously, it could just find its way leaking into our music, as does a whole lot of other stuff that I listen to as well.”
One way the album achieves its sense of flow and coherency is in its lyrics. The album's storyline is a grand allegory of light and dark, tyranny and subjugation – all evoked in the stunning space god created by artist Adam Burke on its cover. This entity gives its name to the song “Celestial Tyrant”, which its lyric describes as a “waster of worlds”. The enslaved populace seeks to “uncover a gate that leads to the distant stars” and leave “this barren world behind” (“The Cloak of the Vast and Black”). This is Anciients' version of the familiar sci-fi trope of an alien intelligence arriving to rule over humanity, made famous in works like Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End.
Through later songs “The Torch” and “Candescence”, it feels like enlightenment has been attained. But on the final track, “In the Absence of Wisdom”, things turn sour: “We are now the demons/We’ve become the snakes/Following the footsteps/Of the ones we hate”.
“‘In the Absence of Wisdom’ is actually about them not learning from history and repeating the mistakes of the people that took them over in the end. So it's actually a bit of a gloomy sort of ending,” says Cook.
The significance of this was not lost on the two of us, a Canadian and a Brit, having a conversation about not learning from the mistakes of history a week after the US presidential election.
Elsewhere on the record, Cook places more personal imagery and messages within this sweeping framework. The notion of “one that’s taken the sun away” on “Is It Your God” speaks to struggles with mental health and the mindset of being beyond daylight’s reach. The album title itself was drawn from a quote by natural historian David Attenborough in his series Planet Earth. “Is It Your God” also poses more traditional heavy-metal questions about the efficacy of religion in a harsh world, drawn from Cook’s direct experiences.
“One of my best friends growing up, he passed away from cancer,” says Cook. “His mother was a super-religious person and she had so much trauma within her life that went on. Three of her children passed away, and various other things. So the song ‘Is It Your God’ is written through her eyes. It's hard – or it's kind of easy – to question your faith when all this stuff is happening within your life. How could this Overlord let these things happen to you if you're so faithful to them?”
Cook seems emboldened to ask these questions after the cards fate has dealt him over the last eight years. That Anciients has returned with such a dizzyingly accomplished album is testament to his and his bandmates’ staying power. It also reflects the choice to embrace the process when life slows you down, or sidelines progress. The songs on Beyond the Reach of the Sun have benefitted from plenty of time to marinade. And the album’s warning – that humanity’s sense of its history dies in darkness – leaves a bittersweet aftertaste that compels us to linger a while, before we wash it out with anything more bland.
Beyond the Reach of The Sun from Anciients is now available via Season Of Mist. Get the album - HERE
