Straight from the city of Kyev in Ukraine, the band Arhat released in this 2024 their second album called "Secrets Of Ancient Gods", and keeping their style defined by their first album "Dead Life" released in 2020, there's some high quality Groove Metal with some great influences of Death Metal and Thrash Metal, this time with more influences from Oriental and Mid-Eastern influences.
The album starts with an intro the immerses the listener on the atmosphere that will be soon explored in the album using instruments such turkish ney, sitar, some percussions and even symphonic orquestrations.
The first track "Abyss Of Flame" is a perfect introduction and explanation about what we're about to hear through the entire album, headbanging riffs, some constant tempo changes from blast beats to the groovy mid-tempos.
"Karnak" show us the evolving melodies through the headbanging breakdowns that are all over the album with great highlight to Alex Sitkoff's vocals that goes from the traditional aggression to some deep growls.
The next track, "Arcana XVI" keeps the linear progression of the album with some highlights to the ethnics elements on it, it's basically impossible listening to it and not give attention to the percussion that plays a really important role through the song. In this specific one I would like to hear the sitar a little bit louder hecause it sounds a little bit off between the barrage of sound created by the other instruments.
Compared to the previous album, we can say that the band bet more on originality, now we have a really great technical construction and some lyrics in Ukrainian language that makes it feels much more personal to the band, their confort place. "Nasha Khoda Nevpynna" talks about the War in Ukraine and keeps it with some spiritual side, after all, the name of the band is Arhat, and it describes a person who reached the nirvana.
When we talk about musics that hace some regional background, it's always important that we can have some atmosphere on ot to keep the listener inside what is actually is beign addressed in the lyrics, and for sure, Arhat don't fail in this parameter, even the comparation with Nile and Crescent are pretty valid.
The track "Symbols" is a great example of how the guitarrist Anton Skrebov and the bassist Anton Inov can utilize various technics to keep the riffs going like palm-muting, tremolo picking, and cutting through the song with some great melodies that some times gets a little bit proggy, especially when combined with the sitar, not only here but through a lot of songs on the album.
"Path Eternal" is probably my favorite song out there, with some awesoome passages using the trukish ney, the band manages to get a really good atmospheric intro, then to a groovy part with some cutting melodies on it. The percussion here does a great job alongside the orquestrations keeping the sound on full throttle.
"Wheel Of Fate" is probably one of the songs that you will listen more than two times, there's a weird feeling that all the main instruments are here but you can note that the orquestrations were around throught the entire song giving a nice backup to the guitar melodies. The ending riff started by the bass it's one of the peaks of the albums.
The last track in english is "The Great Unknown", with some vocal suport of Dmytro Moskalenko (Violateress) this is the most simple track of the entire album, but still with the sheer violence that we saw on the previous songs.
The last track of the album is sung in Ukrainian, "Shlyah do Prozrinnya", and and just like "Path Eternal", it shows a great work using with the sitar, turkish ney and the orchestrations beign the main thing here. All of that on a traditional Thrash Metal cadence giving a brutal ending for the album.
In general, the album for sure shows a technical evolution of the band, especially when it comes to the atmospheric parts. My only down here, is about the mixing in some moments, the orchestrations, tukish ney and sitar could be a little bit louder, but maybe this is only my perception. It's pretty hard to choose specific songs here, the progression here (throughout the album, not the songs) are quite linear without low points, the energy is everywhere, and it's quite impossible not to headbang to every song on it. Special props to the percussion work here leaded by Ivan Semenchuk, it's complete in every fucking way.
Rating: 8,5
(Solid album)
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