Who the heck are Agatus? According to the internet, they have been at it for nearly thirty-five-years, yet I have never heard of them. Albeit they inhabit a geography of black metal that I rarely visit, in the Hellenic scene. They certainly sound like they are from that scene but do sound a tad colder in their style when compared to the still similar sounds of Rotting Christ and Varathron. Like those fellow Greeks, the simplicity of Agatus’ sound is endearing, somehow taking the clumsiness of Bathory and the attack of Absu and making pleasing output from them. Those melodies are the key to the overall success of Dawn of Martyrdom though. That is where the memorability gets an upgrade from those basic structures and stabs of keys.

It is hard to describe the record as being amateur. Despite it not really stretching its legs all that much, Dawn of Martyrdom still is welcome to stay the full length of its near fifty-one-minute runtime. Once it is playing, I find it hard to turn off, even though it is doing nothing remarkable. This style of black metal is important to remind us all that black metal grew around this bare aesthetic over many decades, but I missed the inception of this genre and so most of the time when I find a record that I have missed from the 90’s, I roll my eyes a little and think “oh, this sound again”. However, Agatus just have a real authenticity to their sound making their debut difficult to resist.

It is no hidden gem or missed classic for my money as these ideas have all been done already and done much better in fact. That’s not to say that I fail to enjoy the album though. Agatus can more than string together a tune, even if the variety factor suffers here (albeit it’s a black metal album so I must base part of my rating on how well it maintains those conventional tropes of repetition and mundane grimness). I would say the standout factor is the attack of the album, which is dogged in its determination to say the least. It may have melody galore and picked string passages drifting around the place but ultimately the album is on the front foot for a lot of the time. If you like the Hellenic scene then you cannot go wrong with Dawn of Martyrdom.

With all the modern variations of black metal it is easy to forget what made it so appealing in the first place. For me, these frosty, often quite simple, tremolo riffs with minimal bass influence, pummelling drums and blastbeats, croaky, cracked vocals intoning lyrics of fantastical occultism and thin and reedy, cheap-sounding synth overlays are a much-appreciated reminder of what it was about black metal that initially spoke to me. In truth, I think a lot of early black metal was actually far more accessible than it is given credit for. It wasn't always the home of the dissonant and avant-garde boundary-pushers it plays host to a lot of the time now and its roots in thrash, speed and particularly death metal were often quite apparent. Of course this is all relative and at the time it was more of a revolution than it appears in hindsight aided, no doubt, by a lot of the myths and legends that surrounded some of the prime movers. What I am getting at with this lengthy preamble is that listening to "Dawn of Martyrdom" for the first time, thirty years after its original release, has been a major positive experience for me, reigniting some of the fire that I felt when first getting into black metal, a fire that has been doused somewhat by a genre that has moved well beyond its original boundaries into areas that too frequently now leaves me unmoved.

In common with many from the Hellenic black metal scene, Agatus sit at the more melodic end of the black metal spectrum with riffs that are generally mid-paced rather than frantically pummelling and which owe a lot to traditional heavy metal's inherent melodicism, allowing each track an identity of its own and giving them quite a high memorability factor alongside a greater degree of accessibility than some of the more kvlt acts of the 90s. Now, personally I think there is plenty of room within the black metal realm for both the melodic and the kvlt with no contradiction in enjoying both. There is a definite tinge of Immortal to the Greeks' debut, a band that proved that you didn't have to only have ultra lo-fi production and relentless blastbeats to sit at black metal's top table, with tracks such as "Spirits From the Depths of Earth" and the opener "Under the Spell of the Dragon" feeling like they would be perfectly at home on the Norwegian's "At the Heart of Winter" album. I am not implying that this is by any means over-produced, not at all, it is still quite sparse production-wise, but it does have just enough meat on its bones to melt some of that nordic frostiness and infuse it with some Aegean brine instead, feeling less like disembodied voices from snow-covered forests and more like natural spirits calling down from mystical island mountaintops.

Very much in similar vein to Immortal's Ravendark mythos, "Dawn of Martyrdom" feels like Agatus are pulling you into an overarching saga rather than just praising satan and cursing religion, unsurprising from a band that calls the bithplace of Homeric epic home. Three of the tracks are quite lengthy, the two already mentioned and the nine-minute "King of the Forest", and these more epic affairs are where Agatus really excel, allowing their penchant for epic storytelling free rein and being my favourites as a result. This isn't the whole story of course, the short, frantic "Black Moon's Blood" sees the band proving that they can kick it with the Darkthrone's of the world and following track "When the Macabre Dance Begins" and the closer, "Nostalgia...", are interludes that sound like the music to formal medieval dances, but generally speaking, they stick to the mid-paced and melodic formula that seems to suit them so well.

I have been on a bit of a trad metal kick over the last few months as I have gone back to metal's 80s heyday with some targeted listening and I think that has really set me up to appreciate this chunk of Homeric Black Metal and its more melodic approach to black metal songwriting. Listening to this has made me wonder why I have never dived deeply into the Hellenic BM scene, a state of affairs it has made me determined to rectify. If you fancy Immortl with a bit of a medieval bent then give this a blast and I don't think you will regret it.

Hate Eternal are another of those bands whose name I have seen all over the place, but which I have never knowingly listened to. Basically "I, Monarch" is pummelling and brutally relentless 2000s death metal - and that is it really. It is unremittingly aggressive and possesses a certain degree of tech-death influence on the songwriting. They don't do anything new with that formula, but what they do they seemingly do very well. Unfortunately this isn't really the sort of death metal that lights my fire, I much prefer a looser, grimier style and whilst this isn't the most constipated-sounding of the brutal death metal albums I have heard, it leans a bit too much towards the rigid intensity end of the death metal spectrum for me to ever fully embrace it.

Don't get me wrong, I don't dislike it as such, in fact there are a couple of real highlights, such as when "To Know Our Enemies" drops into the expansive guitar solo with the didgeridoo playing in the background I think it hits an atmospheric high point. The vocals are great too, Erik Rutan having a suitably brutal-sounding bellow akin to an enraged bull looking to eviscerate a wayward matador. The production is very nice too, clear enough to hear what everyone is up to whilst not becoming too clinical and it is mercifully free of the crazy over-compression ruining a lot of more recent death metal releases. On the whole, however, it is an album I can play, nod my head to in a few places then forget about when it has finished with very little of it sticking with me for long afterwards. I have no idea how this stacks up within the wider Hate Eternal discography and whilst I have no especial aversion to exploring them further, neither am I in any hurry to jump into their back catalogue. Sometimes we just have to say "This is perfectly fine, but not really my bag" and so without it setting a fire in my belly I am never going to award it better than middling marks.

A Pale White Dot appears to represent either a turning point in the career of the band, or a side project. I echo a lot of the early sentiment surrounding this album when I hope that this is not a sign of things to come for Periphery in the future.

For starters, there isn't that much about A Pale White Dot that really stands out. None of the tracks within have that progressive nature to them; uncommon time signatures, whiplash transitions or extended runtimes. I found myself constantly falling out of sync with this album as it worked its way into the musical background as I work on other things. Songs like "Unlocking" and "Carry On" have decent fundamentals and technically sound great, but they are severely lacking in a truly jaw dropping moment that previous Periphery albums have had in spades.

The album really only has two standout moments. The first is the Will Ramos feature on "Subhuman" with its pedal-to-the-metal, unfiltered aggression. The dual vocals are a nice touch to change up the monotony, while the instrumentals have that unnerving texture, albeit far more subtle than what is to be expected by this band. The other moment is "Blackwall", which drops the guitars altogether in favour of new wave synthesizers. As the song builds up over its duration, one may become anxious in anticipation of the return of the drop tuned guitars and a vicious breakdown... only to find out that there will not be one here. The album does return to form immediately following on "Malevolent", but for these two back-to-back tracks, Periphery really made the best use of time.

The issue is that these two tracks are sandwiched in between ten songs of, relatively speaking, mediocrity. Periphery are still a very talented group, even when they are performing less technical music such as on this album, but the pedigree is far too high. This lack of stylistic variety or technical prowess just leaves A Pale White Dot seemingly empty.

Best Songs: Obsession, Mr. God, Subhuman, Everyone Dies Alone

For Fans Of: ERRA, Invent Animate, TesseracT

Continuing my theme of picking records that are by artists/bands who I am already familiar with but do not immediately recognise their side-projects at first glance, I recently discovered Solar Temple via The North playlist. One CD purchase later and I find out that this is one of the guys from Fluisteraars, a reference that I can hear in the first bars of album opener ‘Those Who Dwell in the Spiral Dark’. Despite having just two tracks the album is over thirty-six-minutes long and there is just as much detail in those two tracks as if there was seven or eight to listen through as part of a “standard” offering.

I would probably best describe Fertile Descent as music for the void. Once you are accustomed to the fathomless expanse that you will plummet through for all eternity you will find respite in its more atmospheric moments. You will hear the influence of Drudkh at times whilst on other occasions you will be soothed by otherworldly choral crooning. In short, this record is full of surprises, yet it never truly goes off-piste. For as much as I would recommend putting some headphones on with this one to properly enjoy it, I cannot guarantee that you will be able to still follow all individual elements at first. This is a record that does reward with repeated listens and does take the listener beyond just black metal. It is both dark and uplifting at the same time in fact, a feat many albums in this realm fail to pull off.

If we wanted to get into genre pedantry, then we could describe Fertile Descent as post-black metal, although blackgaze would be a stretch too far. Solar Temple are certainly unafraid to stretch their legs, regardless of one’s opinion of exactly where that takes them too. There is nothing alienating about Fertile Descent yet at the same time there is no evidence of the duo that make up Solar Temple crying out for mainstream stage lights either. Instead, the album sounds like an honest committal to tape of what excites and motivates the artists. I won’t pretend to love all of it, but I can certainly relate to most of it, and that’s progress folks.