Band:	Lord Agheros
Album:	As A Sin
Style:	Extreme gothic metal
Release date:	September 2008

01. Drama Begins
02. The Gate Of Solitude
03. Glory Through Death
04. Sacrilegium
05. Intermezzo
06. Ash To Ash And Dusk To Dark
07. As A Sin
08. Dancing In The Dark
09. Escape

On the info sheet I received along with this CD Lord Agheros is described as ?arcane ambient black", but to be frank the only black I could find on ?As A Sin" are some hoarsely croaked black metallish vocals, and they're spread pretty thin on this almost 49 minute long second album by the Italian one-man band.

So if this isn't black metal what is it? Most of the music is ambient, mainly with piano and synths accompanied by some rather slower drumming and the occasional choir or aforementioned hoarse, distant-sounding black metal vocals. Electric guitars are rare, and when they're actually present they always stay in the background, depending on the song there is quite some acoustic guitar work too. Next to the ambient there is seems to be a gothic metal influence spread over the album like a blanket, covering the whole music. The emphasis is obviously on atmosphere and melancholic soundscapes throughout the whole thing.

Evangelou Gerassimos, sole member of Lord Agheros (if we don't count a female guest singer who has a few parts near the end of the album), tried to fit a lot of different atmospheres into this disc. Here we have the epic film-score-esque interlude, there we have the dark but very pretty piano solo, the melancholic keyboard section, the drifting off into a spacey void and the list goes on. Sometimes he perfectly manages to bring these atmospheres across, at other times he's far from them.

He also uses a number of samples here and there, for example a rain day (complete with thunder in-between) in the background of the piano solo on "Intermezzo", but also some weird tribal-eastern-electro-jazz samples on "Sacrilegium". I'm always in for experiments, sometimes they work and sometimes they don't, in the case of "Sacrilegium" it didn't unfortunately.

So how shall my verdict be in the end? Please note that I had to put a lot of thought into the rating this time. Some of the piano parts are really good, but then they start boring me after a while. The extreme vocals fit very well, but they're pretty thinly spread anyway. The female vocals add depth, but they're only on the last two songs.

What I can say for sure though is that Evangelou certainly has talent on the keys but he's also really good with nice melodies, yet on this CD the whole concept just didn't work out. In the end the whole music just isn't 'dramatic' enough. The atmospheres just aren't deep enough and while the piano melodies are really nice sometimes, it would be really nice if the music just had some more substance at times, a short heavy, distorted guitar riff in-between, perhaps a heavier vocal part here and there, and this album could have been a lot better than it is. The potential is present, but unfortunately it wasn't fully used.