I watched a drug deal unfold two feet away from me at a bus stop next to the del Norte Bay Area Rapid Transit station at 10:30am on a Friday morning. The act was recklessly flagrant – not even half-hidden behind the back – and it was openly observed by myself and three other strangers who had the unfortunate distinction of being in a public place at the wrong time. What really stuck with me, however, was the fact that it all went down while “Enthroned in Clouds and Fire (The Great Cleansing)” drifted into my ears through my headphones:
“When money turns to iron and our misery burns red
When two hundred gulden cannot buy a loaf of bread
When the heavy-handed lord arrives and skins his folk alive
When laws are made that none obey – the Great Cleansing is near.”
Even if bedlam isn’t happening directly outside your front door, all one need do is watch the national news for ten minutes in order to quickly become overwhelmed with frustrated feelings of “where the Hell have we all gone wrong?” At this point, I think I’d actually feel an odd sense of relief if some “great cleansing” were truly at hand. And a tune like “Enthroned in Clouds and Fire” that beautifully melds metal designs from Hammerheart era Bathory and Manowar‘s Into Glory Ride serves as an ideal accomplice to that end.
Now from the close of the Hippolytian “Heresiarch (Thousandfaced Moon)”:
“Oh Thousandfaced Moon, oh doom of lost Atalant
Wading ‘mid corpses – through cities of dust
Oh monarch of mayhem, oh mind-reaping messenger
Rise from the dirges and wailing of psalms
Oh pestilent force, burst forth from the tombs of space
To rave and to rape and to rip and to rend.”
Another lengthy tune, this time heralding the arrival of “the unholy stalker among the lambs,” and set to a blueprint of Spectre Within/Awaken the Guardian, but with a grimmer, doomier stance. Stretched, glassy, and crushingly majestic – it’s a heretical conclusion that slowly consumes the listener over the course of its towering eleven minutes.
This is the general Atlantean Kodex design: to deliver extended, epic heavy doom metal that’s stubbornly (and willingly) rooted in the past – both lyrically and musically. And boosting the ante even higher, the band delivers their brand in a decidedly intelligent style. Sure, it’s satisfying to rely on our genre when we’re struck with the mood to cruelly or evilly clout heads, but a cursory glance at the way the lyrics for The White Goddess flow makes a strong case for this being heavy metal’s equivalent to an epic Greek poem. Mithraism, the roots of Europe, and the “White Goddess of birth, love and death” are also spun into the yarn. In this regard, Atlantean Kodex stands as the sort of band that spurns the digital age because the complete package is only fully realized with lyric sheet (and artwork) in hand. I wouldn’t be surprised in the least if The White Goddess inspired some to research unfamiliar grounds further, and that’s a rare beauty in music today.
Infectious choruses, heavy galloping, and sweeping leads (the midpoint of “Sol Invictus” and the 3-minute mark of “Twelve Stars and an Azure Gown”: pant-soilingly epic) – The White Goddess is a masterful look at how to innovatively advance antediluvian metal principles into a modern work of epic grandeur. If we must begrudgingly take a front-row seat to the decaying “progression” of civilization, why not watch the curtain fall while listening to something that makes you feel as if you’re soaring above the collapse.
A clear contender for album of the year.
