A/Oratos, Ecclesia Gnostica, France, Les Acteurs de l’Ombre Productions, AO 230 CD / LPAO-231 vinyl LP (2024)
Nearly five years after releasing their debut work “Epignosis” and with changes in personnel along the way, A/Oratos have finally put out their first album “Ecclesia Gnostica” which (as its title suggests) revolves around the band’s interest in esoteric spirituality and Gnostic philosophy as pathways towards awakening those qualities in human beings that enable them to transcend their material natures and desires, and to unite them with sacred and divine mysteries. With such ambitions, you’d expect very powerful, even forceful and aggressive music in carefully composed and structured songs, all performed to a consistently high technical level and given the best possible production. Of course, the musicians won’t score a perfect 10 out of 10 on all these expectations but they do strive here to give their very best on all seven songs featured.
Opening track ““Le Hiérophante” (“The Hierophant”: a priest or other person who interprets sacred mysteries) sets the style and standard for the album with energetic, even belligerent music packed with sharp riffs, hard-hitting percussion and ragged grim vocals spitting venom and aggression. There is much happening in this track all at once, with various instruments following their own trajectories though they all do harmonise and rise and fall together – even the background ambient / orchestral keyboards, faint and slower than the rest of the music, have their own work to do – and all this activity results in a song that is grand and epic in its scope even though at just over six minutes it’s not particularly long. Follow-up track “Daath” likewise is a very busy and multi-layered track of melodic BM with progressive rock influences and coldspace ambient keyboard wash. Vocalist Aharon includes both grim BM vocals and clean-toned spoken-voice declamations in a song featuring near-doomy rugged riffing and tough-as-nails percussion.
As the album continues, the music expands to take in acoustic folk melodies in amongst the harder, heavier melodic BM (which at times verges on thrash) and the colder symphonic keyboard drone-wash backdrops. Choirs and clean singing feature on the more dramatic and emotional moments of third track “Deuteros”, and there are moments where the synthesisers almost dominate the song with their frosty tones. Subsequent songs continue in more or less grand style, sometimes featuring blast-beat percussion and spurts of solo lead guitar shredding along with the raging, ranting vocals and angular, occasionally awkward riffing that usually starts most songs and gets them powered up so they can expand in range and mood and fly off on various tangents. For closing track “Le Septième Sceau” (“The Seventh Seal”), the A/Oratos men pull out all the stops for a blackened prog-rock mini-opera of mediaeval-sounding melodies and grand orchestral flourishes and effects.
In their eagerness to record and produce the grandest melodic BM opus they can muster – I imagine after a fair few years of not being able to record and release studio work, A/Oratos were mad keen on putting out their best and letting everyone know they were back in business in a big way – Aharon, Wilhelm (guitars) and the rest of the band overlooked the one thing that “Ecclesia Gnostica” really needs to stand out, and that is infectious and catchy tunes of the sort that burrow deep into your mind and refuse ever to leave, along with the layers of riffs, changes of rhythms and keyboard ambience packed into the songs. Funnily, individual songs can stand on their own but when all of them are heard together from start to finish, they don’t really stand out much from one another. When there’s so much happening on all tracks and the music is equally dense on all of them, the songs end up appearing much the same. My feelins is that the odd all-acoustic folk piece here or all-synth / electronic ambient instrumental there would have given the album more musical and thematic variety, depth and mystery.
Even as it is, warts and all, this is a very ambitious work with plenty of ideas and potential to improve on and even go far beyond the core melodic BM style with its progressive rock and orchestral synth elements and tendencies.