Age of Retrogression

Bohemian Grove is another quite new band – formed in 2006 – from the Greek underground. Age of Retroggretion is the first full-length album of the band. The fact that they offer their albums for free download from their site, gave them an advantage. The first thing that caught my attention was the very beautiful cover. Simple, it shows the symbol of the band, the owl, in the background and in the foreground the snake in a circle bating its tail or as it is called Ouroboros. A cover that wouldn’t remind me of a Black Metal release but more of a Stoner or Pagan band.

In this album, the band has many musical wanderings. You will listen to Norwegian Black with many changes. In some parts the influences of Greek Black scene are clear but also of Heavy metal sound. I came across some slow Doom, other times groovy Heavy Metal but also some epic passages. The production is clear and all instruments are noticeable. The riffs have some really good ideas and some of the changes are very interesting. The drums and the bass guitar fill the sound very well. The vocals are mostly dirty, heavy, liquid, Black metal but they remind me very much of mainstream bands, they don’t have neither inspiration nor personality and that annoys me a lot. In the first track there is a change into clear vocals which remind me of Doomsword and in the second, clear depressive vocals. None of the two changes is good. In general the vocals although they don’t make mistakes, they are mediocre and dull. The lyrics deal with Satan, hatred whereas in the last track the band expresses its social. Unfortunately while there are some very good riffs in almost every track, their great length in combination with the often changes make the good moments disappear. Another disadvantage is the alternation of disconnected feelings. For example we travel from frozen filled with hatred feelings to epic and then to melancholic-depressed feelings.

Summarizing, I find this album a little divided and with no clear orientation. The group shows that they want to put all their musical influences and wanderings together in an album consisted of 5 tracks! However you should pay some attention to the band because they show that they have inspiration which in the future may lead us to something good and to the album because there are some very interesting moments and finally it is much better from all those new bullshit that the “big mainstream” bands offer to us…