It’s a cover of wonderfully lurid colours that greets me with the Greek melodic black metal bands debut full length; deep blues, sickly greens and bright blood red. Kind of stops you in your tracks which is probably a good thing in this ADS world.

Inside the music I think it’s fair to say that you don’t get a great deal to identify the nationality of Erevos but they do start as they mean to go on. This is black metal with keyboard driven melody. Not light and ethereal, think death tinged guitars with the unsettling and oddly discordant keyboards that Cradle Of Filth used to be so good at dropping in.

Opener Adou Katavasis sprinkles them in piano form dancing up and down the scale over some classic styled riffing and deathly growls. Under The Wings Of Thanatos has an organ feel to them as the guitars scamper up along a trilling scale and the vocals bite deeper into a death metal style. Grotesque Blasphemy is a pounding bit of blackened death that halts totally for the keyboard passages at the beginning before incorporating them back into the whole. Kerveros is schizophrenic death and black welded together by those keys.

It doesn’t sound inspiring on the screen but actually there is a fair bit to recommend here. The songs maybe mostly mid paced pieces but they are all ten, including the outro of weirdness and classical strings, defiantly different songs. They never become entangled in endless twiddling and tempo changes and while there are enough of the latter they are refreshingly straight forward affairs. There’s also a gothic feel cloaking everything here, too, which really should appeal to the CoF audience, maybe, or early Gehenna.

I think the problem I have is that there is nothing that grabs me by the throat or the guts and threatens to drag me under. It’s not bland; the keyboards and the heavy death metal stylings woven through the black metal give character but after it’s gone I feel a little flat. Some of that can be laid at the door of an uninspired production for me; the sound is  too levelled on the whole which keeps the songs from shining. Then there is also the fact that this is their first full length so perhaps with a bit more time and confidence we might hear stronger things.

This is a good debut to be honest and has a curiously but attractive old fashioned flavour to the sound which is used very well. Not bad at all and well worth a peek but not quite there yet.

(6/10 Gizmo) 

http://www.myspace.com/erevos666