LORD AGHEROS – Anhedonia

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• Bands:
  LORD AGHEROS
• Duration: 00:39:51
• Available from: 01/03/2025
• Label:

• My Kingdom Music

'Anhedonia' it is the term used to indicate the pathological inability to experience pleasure, in all its forms. Food, sex, even simple interpersonal relationships become colorless, plagued by a sense of loss towards something beyond one's reach.
Gerassimos Evangelou, the creator of the one-man band Lord Agheros, has chosen this term as the title for his new recording chapter, after the splendid “Koiné”, which we had also praised on our pages. We don't know the reason for this choice – perhaps Gerassimos himself will explain it to us during the interview – but it leaves a strange aftertaste to associate the concept of anhedonia with this album, which instead is so rich in ideas and sensations.
There is a sense of loss, of course, an underlying melancholy that pervades all the traces that we could associate with this sort of apathy of the senses; but it would be a serious mistake to imagine a cold or, worse, colorless disk. “Anhedonia”, in fact, confirms Lord Agheros' enormous ability to give life to stratified compositions, which have their roots in his own land, Sicily, but with ramifications so deep as to reach very distant and unexpected places. There remains, as in “Koiné”, a fascination for the Middle East, but this time we find fascinations coming from lands even further away to the east, and then falling back to the north, with its colder and more inhospitable traditions and sounds.
The biographical notes that accompany the album cite influences close to Ulver, Wolves In The Throne Room, Empyrium, Ihsahn and Moonspell. True, yet Lord Agheros doesn't really resemble any of these names – so distant even from each other – if not for the open and experimental approach, capable of always looking forward, while delving into the past and history of humanity and of its thousand cultures.
Lord Agheros' music is always a journey and you just need to have the will and desire to abandon yourself to the road, without looking back, only with the desire to discover ever new places and sounds.
By doing so, you too will have the pleasure of listening to the Middle Eastern fascinations of “Lament Of The Lost”; the shamanic rites of “Lost Dreams Ritual” and “Ancient Echoes”; or the delicate and melancholic notes of “Tears In The Silence”, led by the piano and the strings of an acoustic guitar. In “Soul's Descent Into The Void” you will be ferried like Orpheus and Eurydice on a descent into the abyss, first accompanied by the angelic and ghostly voice of a soprano and then, as the light becomes more distant, by a vortex made of black atmospheric metal and sinister orchestrations. And what can we say, finally, about “Sorrow's Shroud”? A song that manages to be full of pain and a sense of loss, yet so proud and proud in its pace.
Once again Lord Agheros mixes avantgarde, atmospheric black metal, symphonic music, folk… Gerassimos' journey is a solitary one, which however does not distance itself from the world, but draws upon it, gathering ideas, reflections and sounds, to recreate something unique .
We had very high expectations for this return and, once again, we were not disappointed.