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| Artwork by Sketch the Soul. |
There's probably no shortage of bands in a lot of different genres that dabble with "exotic" sounds. Imagine somebody bursting into a practice space and saying, "Hey, I learned about the Phrygian dominant scale from my Mel Bay book! Let’s write a 'Middle Eastern' song...about my girlfriend!" Not so with Akhenaten. Listening to their new album, Golden Serpent God, you can tell that there's no dabbling here. It's death metal, yes, but serious thought and study has been put into the Middle Eastern influence and themes.
Akhenaten is just two brothers, Jerred and Wyatt Houseman, who are alumni of Execration, among other bands. I had a brief e-conversation with them, and they cited Melechesh and Al-Namrood--from Jerusalem and Saudi Arabia, respectively--as inspirations for the kind of band Akhenaten is. Their commitment to their brand of death metal-Middle Eastern fusion is also evident by the fact that they "wanted the music to be more focus driven on the ethnic instruments themselves.” They use not just a sitar, which would be an easy and obvious choice, but also the Turkish saz, the oud, and a hammered dulcimer-like instrument called the santoor.
With this arsenal on top of the standard guitar, bass, and drums, Akhenaten creates bottom-heavy death metal with insanely catchy melodies. Whether they're playing a earth-rumbling bottom end that alternates with high melody lines ("Dragon of the Primordial Sea") or combining the thunder with tinkling accents ("Pazuzu: Harbinger of Darkness"). They fuse the western and eastern sounds as seamlessly as metal bands who draw on American or English folk sounds. For my money, Akhenaten actually do it a lot better.
As the band told me, a fascination with Mesopotamian mythology is also clear in the lyrical content. They write about anything from Ereshkigal, the Sumerian goddess of the underworld, to Pazuzu, the king of the demons of the wind in ancient Mesopotamian mythology (and, in my opinion, the subject of the best song on the album). And of course there’s a nice shout out to the Stargate franchise, in whose movie and (multiple) TV shows we learned that the Egyptian gods were actually malevolent alien slave drivers. They deliver all this in both a low, death metal growl and a more Ihsahn-ian croak, not to mention some clean, Middle Eastern vocals in “Akashic Field: Enter Arcana Catacombs,” all of which make for a nice contrast.
I got on board with this band they released Incantations Through the Gates of Irkalla back in 2015, and Golden Serpent God is an improvement in almost every aspect, including composition, balance, and sound quality. That's saying a lot given that Incantations was a damn fine album in and of itself, but Golden Serpent God elevates the band to a new level.