### Acherontas: Vamachara

#### 16/12/11 || BamaHammer

This is definitely your standard, run-of-the-mill Norwegian black metal album from 1995, only they’re from Greece and it’s 2011. From a songwriting standpoint, this is actually pretty decent for a modern black metal album that’s trying to sound like it was released fifteen years ago, with some surprisingly nice, noticeable melodies peppered around and between blasts.

Thinking about the production while I’m hearing it, however, gives my cerebrum diarrhea. The guitars have a good edgy black metal tone, but the drums sound like they were laid down on a Tascam 4-track cassette recorder, creating a huge disparity in the sound of the two instruments when heard together. And, of course, Acherontas abides by the age-old black metal custom of making sure the bass guitar is completely inaudible so that the music is pussified beyond belief.

These fuckers also try to be a bit too pretentious at times as well. They’re lucky I gave enough of a shit to keep listening to them after the ridiculous 2:41 intro track filled with cheap keyboard noises and some semi-evil narrated nonsense that did nothing for me but make me dumber. I’m also at a loss trying to figure out what they were trying to accomplish with the sudden change of pace just after the four-minute mark in the third track when everything takes a hard fade-out only to be replaced by a pointless, lonely, and repetitive clean guitar for the remainder of the track that sounds as if it was recorded in a different studio at a different time by a different fucken band with an angsty teenage guitarist.

These guys aren’t terrible, but they aren’t anything I’m going to be flogging the dolphin over either. This is really a tired genre these days, and these Greeks don’t really do anything to change that perception.

5/10: This is raw, old-school atmospheric black metal. I’ve heard a lot fucken worse. I’ve also heard a lot fucken better.