Review by Sonny for Agatus - Dawn of Martyrdom (1996)

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.