Review Summary: After two decades, Ankor finally reaches their potential.
Ankor are a female-fronted Spanish band that formed in 2003. Originally power metal, they gradually shifted towards alternative metal with electronic and metalcore leanings. Their popularity the past two decades has been middling, as despite their lyrics being in English to appeal to the global market, the bulk of their popularity, until recently, remained in Spain. I discovered them on Youtube roughly six years ago when the music video for their song Holy Wolf was recommended to me via algorithm. I found the song catchy, fresh, and fun, but when I dove into more of the music from their rather expansive past, I was consistently disappointed by how rather generic it sounded. Still, despite the longevity of Ankor, I felt they had potential yet, and that I would keep an eye on them. I then proceeded to forget about them entirely for about five years until after Shoganai had been released; and upon listening to the album in its entirety and delving into how the album was rolled out, it appeared that I had missed a phenomenon.
All eight tracks that make up
Shoganai have an accompanying music video, which the band rolled out gradually for over a year before the release of the completed album. From what I could gather from reading through the comments of these videos, listeners were hanging onto the edge of their seats waiting for the next song to drop during this rollout. Now as someone who prefers to abstain from listening to singles more than once before their album of origin is released, this would have driven me utterly insane; but from what I can deduce from view counts and listener feedback, the band grew a significant audience during this time period. The newfound popularity was not fraudulent either, as the music videos, which appeared to outline the seven stages grief, were colorful and dramatic, and the songs themselves were all of the same quality if not greater than the Holy Wolf single of theirs that I had discovered previously. I knew their potential had finally been met.
Shoganai, which translates roughly from Japanese to “it can’t be helped”, blends elements of metalcore, post-hardcore, and nu-metal with electronics and occasional ambience. The songwriting, with all of its various influences, is sometimes unconventional, and can be disorienting at first; but as I listened repeatedly and fell in love with each individual song, I no longer perceived any “rough” transitions or “disjointed” progressions with these negative descriptors. The individual riffs tend to be fairly straightforward, but they are still catchy, and always enhanced by the deep production and overlaying synthesizers.
Speaking of catchy, where
Shoganai shines the brightest is Jessie Williams’ singing, which is soothing and passionate across all choruses. She also shows a bit of variety – which the aforementioned erratic songwriting calls for – by way of decently ranged screams, and nu-metal-Esque rap-singing (see the song
Venom). In addition to the poignant music videos, Ankor’s audience seems to also deeply resonate with Jessie’s lyrics, which as mentioned before stem from the concept of the seven stages of grief for this album. I personally do not have a propensity for drawing grand relations between song lyrics and my personal life, and tend to focus on how lyrics are delivered rather than what they are; but having read through the album’s lyrics I can only say that Jessie (assuming that she’s the lyricist) has done a wonderful job of penning and performing this concept, as well as the music video producers and the rest of the band for bringing it to visual realization.
If you look closely at
Shoganai’s album cover, to the right of the title in smaller font it says “Mini Album Vol. 1”. As of the time of my writing this review, which is about a year after discovering this album, and a year and a half after it was released, I have actively avoided listening to and watching the music videos for the newer songs that Ankor have released, which may or may not comprise a “Volume 2” of
Shoganai. Due to the sheer pleasure I had going into Volume 1 blind, and still have as I listen to this album frequently, I hope to replicate that same experience in my future indulgence of Ankor. To conclude, I want to mention that while Shoganai was likely written with the accompanying music videos idea in mind, it is in its own right a fun and interesting genre-blending album that can be fully enjoyed on its own.
