ATHEMON: Athemon (PROGRESSIVE METAL): review / opinion to read on Music Waves

The coronavirus pandemic will have hurt on many levels. While the world was turning in on itself in March 2020 and the whole of humanity was plunged into expectation, in a climate of fear mixed with a feeling of the unknown, somewhere in Brazil, in the city of São Paulo, a man was on the verge of making his dream come true: that of launching his musical project, Athemon.

Passionate about metal, and in particular progressive, Adriano Ribeiro randomly contacted a certain Tom MacLean, known for having been the bass player of Haken until the release of their album "The Mountain" in 2013. With Tom advertising his UK-based production studio at the time, Adriano simply hoped for a return of the talented bassist. Instead, he fell under the spell of the Brazilian musician's music and offered him to join the band in addition to handling the mixing! The project became a reality.

Mixed by Tom MacLean, and mastered by the sound engineers of Fascination Street Studios, world-renowned on the metal scene, this first opus of Athemon was born in the most beautiful way. Combining beauty and darkness as the duo likes to describe it, this record is tinged with a heaviness paradoxically carrying hope, declining wild riffs in the Mastodon style ('Whispers') and dissonant arpeggios in the Opeth style ('Perception', 'Seed Of Change'), contrasted by more luminous flights ('Birth', 'Reaching Deepness').

But rather than proposing a mixture of influences of these bands, Athemon even goes as far as creating its own identity, through an album that we can perceive as being constituted of a long song of 50 minutes, itself subdivided in 9 parts, extremely coherent and linked to each other. We can already feel the will of the band to propose a personal universe with notable characteristics and very well felt fulgurances in the composition ('The Glass Hindered Us', 'Whispers').

While Adriano Ribeiro was initially unsure of being the right singer for this project, after being persuaded of the opposite by dint of hard work, he delivers a majestic and brilliant performance of accuracy and singularity. Impressive in the very powerful and deep voices ('Reaching Deepness', 'Whispers'), he also illustrates himself in different registers as the guttural vocals as on the corrosive and progressive 'Seed Of Change', and also in a more schizophrenic register in order to illustrate the dialogue of a man between him and his spirit in his quest of personal evolution. The vocal harmonies are legion on this album and recall Alice In Chains, both in the interpretation and in the dissonant or sometimes almost unhealthy side of the music, catching the listener's ear.

Tom MacLeanshows himself here in the most beautiful way, sometimes rightly supporting the rhythms in order to add a touch of heaviness, sometimes in more convoluted developments proper to progressive metal ('I Voice Of Mine', 'Whispers').

By releasing this album, Adriano Ribeiro has realized his dream, or rather his first dream, because as he says in his interview on Music Waves, the Athemon adventure is only at its beginning! In any case, that's what we wish them, because by confirming their qualities, the musicians could really take a step forward and establish their notoriety on the metal scene. - Official website

ATHEMON

ATHEMON

AUTOPRODUCTION

PROGRESSIVE METAL