With its fourth release, and only its second solo one, after Joey Anderson’s ‘Act Of Speech’, Amir Alexander and Chris Mitchell’s Anunnaki Cartel has reached a peak of sorts. That isn’t to say there haven’t already been any high points, nor won’t there be in the future.
However, the quartet featured here, particularly ‘Aquanauts’ and ‘Nibiru’ are as close as I feel it’s necessary to get to sonic nirvana while keeping things real and raw.
Having said that, this is a game of two halves, the sparser ‘Push’ and ‘Smash Linear’ paired up on one side, with the deeper and transcendental ‘Aquanauts’ and ‘Nibiru’ on the other. The two former tracks sound like something that could have come out on Relief, but with a hazier, messier edge to them. Both rely on steady percussive patterns, interplayed with a monotonously intoned vocal in the case of ‘Push’ and a more eloquent synth in ‘Smash Linear’.
These couple of intense workouts, although effective enough, pale into relative insignificance once the record is flipped and the needle placed on ‘Aquanauts’, a beautiful, builder of a track whose stellar overtones feel like they should go on forever.
Thankfully the general feel is continued with ‘Nibiru’, the standout track on the EP for me. Similar in tone to ‘Aquanauts’, it’s a bath in the Sea of Tranquility and reminds me of a combination between E Dancer’s ‘Heavenly’ and ‘The Human Bond’, embodying both beauty and aggression simultaneously.
A great release that I haven’t stopped playing since I received it, if there is a soundtrack to accompany the pyramids that are emblematic of this label, then this is it, particularly the b side.
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