The easiest reviews to write are those that either inspire me to heap praise on an album or spit venom at it, neither of which I can claim happens with this one. It’s fairly obvious from the epic title and the rather colourful cover that heroic battles and the likes are the topic of choice for these Greeks, and sure enough, the music lives up to that expectation. But for some reason, this just isn’t grabbing me. Band like Athlos suffer from a conundrum that hardly effects all bands in quite the same way. I mean, you can release an unremarkable thrash album and fans will still bang their heads. As long as a death metal album sounds brutal then fans don’t really care if it’s not a masterpiece, and how many mediocre Maiden rip offs do we really need, but still they get the Bloodstock stock whipping out the air guitars.
With folk metal, battle metal, epic metal, orchestral metal etc. I think I’m not alone in that I expect something more from it; a different experience if you will, and if the album isn’t good enough to give me that then it really fails to do its job. Athlos join a scene that has seen rapid expansion over the past couple of years and increasingly I’m seeing a glut of newcomers who perhaps have their hearts in the right place and a fairly competent grasp of their instruments, yet fail to really deliver the goods. That oomph that gives bands like Turisas and Falkenbach their edge is simply missing and to use an analogy it’s all rather like watching a pedestrian make his way round an Olympic running track; plodding along as the athletes run laps around him, knowing that this guy isn’t really going to get anywhere and feeling kind of impatient watching.
So, what’s wrong with this album, I hear you ask. Well, the first thing that comes to mind is the narrative voice that seems to be an almost integral part of the album. Sure enough, this succeeds in creating a very pompous feel that’s in fact rather like listening to an audio equivalent to LOTR. There is a fine line though, and this just about oversteps it and the excessive spoken passages come close to spoiling the music. My main gripe however is not the amount of narrative, but rather the occasionally clumsy application of these passages; quite often they just do not fit the general flow of the music, and in particular on opener ‘In The Vineyards Of Dionysus’ I begin to wonder if what I am listening to is even purposely in the mix or just a particularly irritating voiceover applied for promo purposes.
This isn’t a terrible album and I’d hate to paint a wholly negative picture as that just wouldn’t do it justice. Once we move away from the spoken passages, we arrive at a bustling market town where indistinct chitter-chatter of peasant villagers can be heard building up to the heralding of the king, as a heroic battle swagger ensues. The keyboards on ‘The Wrath Of The Hekatonkheives’ give a rather despondent feel to their sound and this track has a Crematory-esque distance to it that I like. ‘Aegean Blue (Poseidon’s Realm)’ sounds rather blue indeed and I get the feel here of being stranded on a desert island listening to the soothing crashing of the waves. As this segues into ‘The Dance Of Kouretes’ I am somewhat baffled by the sudden change in both style and tempo, which comes across as clumsy and disjointed and which gives the impression that not much thought has gone into the arrangements. While there is a continual feeling of regality and epicness throughout this album, I just feel it suffers from a lack of true direction with some of the tracks really not sitting well next to others.
‘Enslaved: A Slave’s Odyssey’ is one of the stand out moments for me as it portrays a rather beguiling sense of mystique and ambience that I love. It’s a bit of a round the world affair as it begins with bagpipes that firmly place my mind up in the highlands as you can imagine the sounds and the wailing female vocals seeping across the misty atmosphere as the wind blows in the other direction. The track builds up through chain gang chants as the males vocals yowl out a-capella, demonstrating a trace of power metal influence in the high range, again on ‘Talos Unleashed’ where he really lets rip like his girlfriend just jabbed her knee into his groin. There’s quite a tale being told here from what I can gather and I’m soon dragged into the desert where I’m exposed to a middle-eastern heat as the sky settles into a dusky pink, sounding ethnic and most transfixing. This actually rather neatly moves into ‘Hellas Eternal’ which contrasts the magical and ethereal nature of its predecessor with an upbeat melody and vocals that remind of Borknagar.
Certainly this is one I would recommend in the event that it is going for a couple of quid on E-Bay, but not one I’d pay full price for. ‘In The Shroud…’ isn’t the most lustrous of examples of the genre, though there are enough likable factors to make this worthy of your attention. Hear it for yourself at;
http://www.myspace.com/athlos01
http://www.truemetal.org/secretport
