As you’re about to see in the lyric video we’re premiering, the scribe of the Athenian band Chthon is a talented story-teller, though the tale told in the title track to Chthon‘s new album Eremite is a narrative of supernatural horror. It recounts the experience of a ruined, one-eyed zealot offering himself before a basalt shrine to an unnamed terror from another dimension.

The music tracks the tale in a progression of sound that’s just as supernatural and frightening as the words. In its initial phases the song presents the physical and mental ruin of the eremite — famished, face scarred, fingers mangled, body afflicted by festering wounds, and his one remaining eye unnaturally dilated — and simultaneously creates a chilling occult atmosphere.

In those initial phases, slow isolated notes reverberate in their gloom through an ambient mist, and then the band proceed in a massive mid-paced stomp, with distorted guitars deepening the feeling of oppressive gloom. A wailing guitar melody begins to slither and sway, like the exotic strains of a snake-charmer, but the melody is disturbing — it channels illness and misery. Continue reading »