Beyond Acheron

The moment he pulled the plug on the long-lasting Acheron saga in 2019, Vincent Crowley started this initiative here under his own name. More recent members of Acheron (the guitar players Art Taylor & Eric Stewart) have also joined for the ride which is strictly oriented towards the heavier doom-laden side of the Acheron repertoire, one that Crowley managed to pull off well throughout his band’s career, with a few “victorious” exceptions.

Expect both epic and traditional doom metal heroics to befall you, those currents gracefully bound by frequent rushes of death metal accelerations, Crowley supervising the dark atmospheric musicalities with his staple sinister semi-shouty growl. There’s quite a bit of melody exuded both from the lead and the riff department, this segment sometimes serving a solemn, funeral-like procession (“My Eternal Vow”), sometimes helping the good old death (“La Muerte”) mount a slower epic horse. “Bring forth the Dead” is a lively dynamic cut, the only place where death metal takes the upper hand, providing a brutal blasting boost to the proceedings. Not that those need this particular ingredient that much as the established doomy clout provides enough delights which come served regularly, the excellent Candlemass-esque march “Masquerade gu Macabre” striving for the highlight, aptly backed-up by the sombre tenebrous rhythms on “Farewell (at Death's Door)”, a marginally more dynamic trip with formidable seismic wall-tumbling riffs.

Not drastically different from the vintage Acheron sound, this album is both a continuation and an elaboration on it. Crowley has always shown a penchant for the doomy and the slower, but if his previous more thorough exploration of those realms (“Hail Victory”, 1995) was a tired uninspired affair, also based on a previously released material, here he captures the very essence of the doom metal currents, spicing them with just the right doze of more dynamic deathly strokes in order to make them appealing to a larger crowd, and not only to the Acheron one. This is a confident erudite stroll into an already familiar realm, where the man by all means feels welcome, knowing its peculiarities inside/out, but never trying them in that exact manner before. The black metal element has been completely removed from the lyrical content; needless to add, there’s almost no traces of it on the music front, either; Crowley feeling introspective, pensive, and less belligerent, having exorcised whatever demons were plaguing him earlier after spending more than 30 years playing, singing and touring on the metal circuit…

or maybe not; cause he also takes part in a more boisterous, less holy death meal outfit, an enterprise he actually started before that one, in 2016 to be precise, Infidel Reign the name, with former members of the Dutch death metal veterans Asphyx. Asphyx, Acheron… (un)holy brotherly unions get formed all the time… all in the name of high quality metal and its ever-devoted loyal fans.