Exchanging some opinions on the net with a friend who was commenting on the lyric video of Lake Water (a wonderful song with the vocal contribution of the talented Federica “Lenore” Catalano), I inserted a comment with which I more or less claimed that, finally, Lord Agheros had turned in a decisive way towards the atmospheric ambient, abandoning or almost abandoning the black metal pulses that were a substantial counterpart in previous works. The funny thing is that, going to reread the review written at the time for Demiurgo, I wished exactly the opposite, from which two things can be deduced: 1) that the opinions expressed on music (and on any form of art in general) are fallible as subjective and heavily influenced by the emotionality of the specific moment in which they are expressed 2) that Gerassimos Evangelou, if he had taken vision at the time of my wish, has not taken into account at all, doing moreover very well. After having made the necessary amends, however, I allow myself to say that Nothing At All appears definitely more organic in its progression compared to its predecessor and, while remaining rather robust tracks, the whole is not penalized by that dichotomy that seemed to persist irremediably between the tracks of black matrix and those of ambient nature. In fact, even when the guitars impose their heavy presence with a robust riffing, the sound substrate is always wrapped in an atmospheric halo that protects the melodic lines, giving continuity to the contents of the shorter tracks characterized by liquid and rarefied sounds. We have already mentioned Lake Water, an ethereal and emotional track that represents one of the compositional peaks of the album, as well as one of the two episodes in which the song form takes shape in a relatively canonical way: the other is The Day To Die, in which a melancholic delicacy prevails over remnants of aggression. The musical poetry of which is steeped in a magnificent song like the piano On The Shore finds its dichotomous counterpart in the square riffing of Idiocracy, whose samples bring back to the darkest moments of the last century, even if, on closer inspection, is the overall mood that binds in an indissoluble way songs apparently different in approach; the same happens for the previous No More Rules / Life And Death, while the sound of the backwash, which introduces the final trio of songs, brings the album definitely on a more introspective level (the pearl What We Deserve recalls the most melancholic Penguin Cafe Orchestra), leaving at the end of the listening those moments of suspension in which the emotions experienced are quickly passed in review. Nothing At All is the highest point reached by a musician who, in my opinion, still has much to say, and the fact that his sound has been almost completely stripped of its black heritage allows Gerassimos to finally escape from a sort of misunderstanding that accompanied his previous works. If Lord Agheros is a name that continues to be rightly ascribed to the metal, net of the background of the musician or the harshness still present in more than one song, it is mainly for a feeling that unites him to the circle of the most sensitive fans and inclined to take from the music its most emotional aspects: also for this reason I think that a work like Nothing At All will be appreciated by two groups of people who often overlap, basking in the darkness, such as lovers of the most evocative doom and those of dark ambient.

2016 – My Kingdom Music