Artist: Agathodaimon
Label: Massacre Records
Release: 2009
Rating: 3/5
The first album after a five-year break, and thus the fifth studio album from German black metallers Agathodaimon, presents the band in a completely new lineup. Of the original members, only guitarist Sathonys is still around. Clearly the band needed a good while to pull itself together, get the engine running and adapt to the new situation in the music industry. So the new album brings a few novelties that won’t sit well with everyone. Especially those of you who still remember the band’s first two albums and loved them for being all-out classic black metal, with a convincing doom-laden atmosphere and an effective knack for painting the blackest of blacks on the last day of the human race.
Today’s Agathodaimon “commercialize” their sound. The phrase that hints at “wider accessibility” is certainly a bit too harsh, but still, it suggests that the revamped band is leaning more and more on melodic components, sometimes bizarrely simplified (minimalization), meaning strings of motifs with as little complication as possible. The chosen tactic makes sense for a band like Agathodaimon. They “hitch a ride” on creating atmosphere. That is, putting the mood front and center so it takes absolute primacy over every other factor in the band’s sound. The easier listenability, which feeds into the further “softening” of the sound, also shows in the occasional software samples the band glues on top of the rhythmic foundation (Heliopolis).
Most of the “black-metalness” in the new Agathodaimon is preserved by the vocals. They screech mostly on a single frequency, with little to no movement away from the starting position of the basic growl. This definitely creates a heavier dose of monotony, especially in sections where the basic motifs repeat (e.g. the exit points of songs in the choruses). Agathodaimon are obviously well aware of this danger, so they also turn to clean vocals, delivered in the muffled, low-pitched voice of guitarist Sathonys, used mainly in the pre-choruses. When those kick in, the spirit of dark and gothic metal floods the new record. Those two elements are strongly present throughout the music anyway, since the motifs mostly unfold at a mid-tempo pace, and even when the motifs driving a song switch, the rhythm practically doesn’t change. Agathodaimon mostly try to patch this up with massive double bass drum assaults in the choruses. Not a single song on the album stands out in terms of quality or style. Agathodaimon stick to just one recipe the whole way through.
The production is typically German. In “black metal” that means, in the vast majority of cases, an inability to build real cohesion between the keyboards (and/or added orchestral arrangements) and the guitar riffing, which is, admittedly, “a light snack” for the Scandinavian heavyweights of the “black metal” genre and EMŠOa Agathodaimon. That’s why “Phoenix” is a less interesting, less tense album. An album with fewer vampire bites, and one that lacks some real firepower! We can say that, regardless of the band’s reaffirmation that Agathodaimon achieve with its release (hence the obvious title), the album just doesn’t feel original or exploratory, without the provocative freshness and inspiration Agathodaimon still offered on their first two albums. Roughly speaking, that doesn’t mean Agathodaimon aren’t successfully hammering nails with a hammer, but that hammering could have been done without restraint and with a bit more wit, maybe even with a mallet. So the album is good quality, but it lacks the element of surprise that the band’s basic free-spirited artistic stance is supposed to dictate. Had that been satisfied, “Phoenix” would easily make the cut among the excellent albums that take a special place in the listener’s heart. A place that stays permanently open and ready for constant rotation of this album in the CD player. Instead of a lion roaring on the album, a chihuahua farted. Pfft,… So much for the worship of Satan.
Lineup
Chris “Ashtrael” Bonner – vocals
Martin “Sathonys” Wickler – guitar, vocals
Felix Ãœ. Walzer – keyboards
Jan Jansohn – guitar
Till Ottinger – bass
Manuel Steitz – drums
Production
Agathodaimon & Kristian “Kohle†Kohlmannslehner
Track list
1. Heliopolis (4:36)
2. Devil’s Deal (4:33)
3. Decline (5:33)
4. Ground Zero (4:47)
5. Ghost of a Soul (4:30)
6. Winterchild (5:34)
7. Time Is the Fire (4:59)
8. To Our Ashes (6:40)
9. Amongst the Vultures (3:22)
10. Oncoming Storm (6:26)
11. Throughout the Fields of Unshaded Grace (5:10)
12. Grey Whisper (6:50)
