Acheron: Those Who Have Risen (1998)

This is the last of the three straight Acheron posts, and possibly the last one.  I have not been blown away by this band as I thought that I would be.  That's a shame, but not unheard of.  This is the band's fifth album and seems to have a general concept of vampirism. 

Yesterday's subject was pretty damn good, but somewhat hard to get into.  This is a much more straightforward album, ditching most of the intro tracks, though there are occasional keyboard-driven interludes.  In fact, that brings me to my overall complaint about the album: the over-reliance on keyboards.  I am not such a metal purist that I despise the use of keyboards in metal, but I generally prefer them to be in more of a supporting role.  They kind of take the lead on this one, playing almost constantly, but generally playing the same riffs as the guitars which gives the sound kind of a murky, otherworldly feel to it.  I suppose it works well given the vampire subject matter, adding a gothic feel to the music, but it does get a little overbearing at times.

Beyond the keyboards, I am just not really blown away by the compositions here.  The songs generally fail to make much of an impact and sound clumsy at times.  There are some decent tracks on here, but most of it is just kind of generic.

I do not hate this album, and I am not even sure it is safe to say I dislike it.  It just does not make much of an impact one way or the other.  It is listenable, but it is not likely one that I will clamor to listen to over and over again.

Acheron: Lex Talionis (1994)

This is the second of three Acheron posts.  This one will be covering the band's second full-length album, released in 1994.  It is kind of surprising to find a release with this kind of sound in the early 1990's.  Both death metal and black metal were still fairly new at this point, so to find a band that could blend the genres so early is a little bizarre. 

As mentioned in yesterday's post, Acheron's primary member is one Vincent Crowley who was for a time a reverend in the Church of Satan.  Lex Talionis is the law of retaliation, which is something of an important principle in Laveyan Satanism.  As Anton Lavey, writer of the Satanic Bible, has said, "if a man smite thee on one cheek, smash him on the other".  And this album is something of a tribute to Satanism, featuring occasional spoken word sections that seem lifted from the Satanic Bible.  It has been awhile since I have read it (and I no longer have a copy), but I am almost sure. 

The album's sound is primarily a particularly brutal form of death metal, borne out of the sound of groups like Morbid Angel, Deicide, Incantation and Immolation with a very dark and evil atmosphere.  The vocals are delivered in a gruff, yet easily understood style.  The proper songs on the album sound great, and if the album were just those songs, this would be a fairly impressive release.

Unfortunately, for some reason, Acheron has chosen to completely frustrate the ability to truly get into this album by including a minute-long intro before every single song.  Usually these are keyboard sections, but occasionally take another form.  The result is an album that sounds really choppy and can sometimes be hard to get into.  That is unfortunate, because when Acheron is playing a full song, it can oftentimes be great.

Acheron: Tribute to the Devil's Music (2003)

The next three posts will cover albums by the long-running blackened death metal band Acheron.  Acheron is primarily the project of Vincent Crowley, who was once a reverend in Anton Lavey's Church of Satan.  The band started out in Tampa, Florida around the same time as the beginnings of the death metal scene, then later moved to Ohio, of all places.

This album, as could be surmised from the title, is a cover album.  Acheron is paying tribute to a number of their musical influences and it is also more of a compilation as the tracks were not all recorded at one time, but rather over the course of the band's history.  As such, the recording quality varies wildly, as does the musicianship.

Unfortunately, there is a little bit of an issue here that makes the covers concept a bit difficult for Acheron to pull off.  Acheron has never been the most dynamic of bands.  Their typical sound is more of a bludgeoning monster and is decidedly one-dimensional.  So when Acheron is covering songs from groups like Judas Priest ("Devil's Child"), KISS ("War Machine") and Iron Maiden ("Wrathchild"), they kind of fall flat.  It's not all bad, their covers of Celtic Frost ("Dawn of Meggido") and Kreator ("Flag of Hate") are pretty decent.

This is absolutely not an essential release among Acheron's discography.  Only hardcore fans will really appreciate this, and even then, I'm not so sure.