At the Burning Horizon

Agarthi are one of those small cults that fill the Italian underground scene. It’s made of several bands that for different reasons never succeeded in having the success they deserved even if they had the skills to emerge from the obscurity. This band, in particular, is very original and ahead for the period: it mixed power/epic metal with black and death parts. Now, someone could say: Children of Bodom? Uhm, why not but here everything sounds more bound to the old, classic Italian history; especially to the Roman empire.

The atmosphere is always very epic and obscure thanks to the good use of keyboards and the melodic guitars riffs. The most extreme things here are the vocals and some more black metal oriented riffs but the rest is epic and dreaming. In the title track when can find great but never cheesy or exaggerated melodies on speed, while the following “And Cursed Will Be The Sun” features excellent piano parts and epic chorus.

I’ve never liked the power metal in its classic German sound (not the good US one) and even if we can find lots of traces of it here, everything is structured to result not annoying at all also for those who are not in this kind of sonorities. What astonished me is the continue change of melody and patterns. Lots of times the songs have something ritualistic inside, giving a more obscure touch to the sound.

This small gem at the time was almost overlooked and, like the other similar cases, now we are ready to pay tribute to it but we don’t care if it’s too late…it’s a shame. If you are a fan of melody, epic passages and obscurity all in an album you must take this one, but it’s really hard to find. This is class folks.