I watched a drug deal unfold two feet away from me at a bus stop next to the del Norte Bay Area Rapid Transit station at 10:30am on a Friday morning. The act was recklessly flagrant – not even half-hidden behind the back – and it was openly observed by myself and three other strangers who had the unfortunate distinction of being in a public place at the wrong time. What really stuck with me, however, was the fact that it all went down while "Enthroned in Clouds and Fire (The Great Cleansing)" drifted into my ears through my headphones:"When money turns to iron and our misery burns red
When two hundred gulden cannot buy a loaf of bread
When the heavy-handed lord arrives and skins his folk alive
When laws are made that none obey – the Great Cleansing is near."
Even if bedlam isn't happening directly outside your front door, all one need do is watch the national news for ten minutes in order to quickly become overwhelmed with frustrated feelings of "where the Hell have we all gone wrong?" At this point, I think I'd actually feel an odd sense of relief if some "great cleansing" were truly at hand. And a tune like "Enthroned in Clouds and Fire" that beautifully melds metal designs from Hammerheart era Bathory and Manowar's Into Glory Ride serves as an ideal accomplice to that end.
Now from the close of the Hippolytian "Heresiarch (Thousandfaced Moon)":
"Oh Thousandfaced Moon, oh doom of lost Atalant
Wading 'mid corpses - through cities of dust
Oh monarch of mayhem, oh mind-reaping messenger
Rise from the dirges and wailing of psalms
Oh pestilent force, burst forth from the tombs of space
To rave and to rape and to rip and to rend."
Another lengthy tune, this time heralding the arrival of "the unholy stalker among the lambs," and set to a blueprint of Spectre Within/Awaken the Guardian, but with a grimmer, doomier stance. Stretched, glassy, and crushingly majestic – it's a heretical conclusion that slowly consumes the listener over the course of its towering eleven minutes.
This is the general Atlantean Kodex design: to deliver extended, epic heavy doom metal that's stubbornly (and willingly) rooted in the past – both lyrically and musically. And boosting the ante even higher, the band delivers their brand in a decidedly intelligent style. Sure, it's satisfying to rely on our genre when we're struck with the mood to cruelly or evilly clout heads, but a cursory glance at the way the lyrics for The White Goddess flow makes a strong case for this being heavy metal's equivalent to an epic Greek poem. Mithraism, the roots of Europe, and the "White Goddess of birth, love and death" are also spun into the yarn. In this regard, Atlantean Kodex stands as the sort of band that spurns the digital age because the complete package is only fully realized with lyric sheet (and artwork) in hand. I wouldn't be surprised in the least if The White Goddess inspired some to research unfamiliar grounds further, and that's a rare beauty in music today.
Infectious choruses, heavy galloping, and sweeping leads (the midpoint of "Sol Invictus" and the 3-minute mark of "Twelve Stars and an Azure Gown": pant-soilingly epic) – The White Goddess is a masterful look at how to innovatively advance antediluvian metal principles into a modern work of epic grandeur. If we must begrudgingly take a front-row seat to the decaying "progression" of civilization, why not watch the curtain fall while listening to something that makes you feel as if you're soaring above the collapse.
A clear contender for album of the year. - Michael Wuensch, Last Rites, http://lastrit.es/reviews/7102/atlantean-kodex-the-white-goddess-(a-grammar-of-poetic-myth)#sthash.xSDnFz8V.dpuf
The White Goddess by Atlantean Kodex is one of those albums that comes around every so often which, thanks to label affiliation, press buzz or a combination of the two, reaches a wide audience of people who ordinarily wouldn’t listen to anything like it. Atlantean Kodex play German power metal, full stop. They’re also likely to find their way onto the year-end lists of plenty of people who can’t name two albums by Blind Guardian or Gamma Ray. (Likewise, the record will probably be ignored by many of the hordes of people who purchase Nightwish CDs.)
This broad reach isn’t Atlantean Kodex’s fault; nor is it the fault of 20 Buck Spin, their Stateside label. (Ván Records is handling the release in Europe.) In truth, it’s not even a problem. But the Internet has bred an increasingly contentious relationship between old-school heshers (who would have sought this album out and eaten it up regardless of its presence on the cool blogs) and younger fans with more extreme tastes. That relationship turns albums that should unite metalheads into battlefields, which, true to the hyperbole tossed around in such discussions, must make The White Goddess Gettysburg. In reality, Atlantean Kodex have just made an interesting record that is worth listening to, but also one that isn’t quite as good as its most ardent defenders would have you believe.
The first thing that leaps out about The White Goddess is the length of its songs. Interludes aside, its tracks weigh in at 10:55, 11:10, 7:44, 9:55 and 11:22, without much inflation from orchestral intros or ambient noodling. These are just long fucking songs — not because they comprise lots of parts, but because Markus Becker has a lot to sing about and Michael Koch and Manuel Trummer want to play a lot of guitar solos. That isn’t to say there’s fat which the band should’ve trimmed, as their songwriting instincts are impeccable. For those who don’t listen to a lot of music with high, clean male vocals, though, Becker’s incredibly earnest delivery of his fantasy-novel lyrics can grate when heard for over an hour.
Luckily, Becker’s earnestness is consistent with the entire Atlantean Kodex experience. The White Goddess doesn’t scan as cheese because it refuses to consider itself with anything less than total seriousness. This approach is most impressive on “Twelve Stars and an Azure Gown (An Anthem For Europe),” which recounts military exploits from Aeneas to Winston Churchill, all watched over by an unnamed war goddess on a white bull. Without the band fully buying in, the center wouldn’t hold, but thanks to the insistent tempo, Koch and Trummer’s elegantly constructed guitar parts, and Becker’s unique voice, the result is a mighty, melodic fusion of While Heaven Wept and Savatage. Other songs suffer from a lack of true hooks, a fatal shortcoming when every song lives and dies by its vocalist. (I couldn’t tell you what “Enthroned in Clouds and Fire (The Great Cleansing)” sounds like after a half dozen listens.) Still, the majority of the album works, and it’s at any rate a huge step up from the band’s fairly nondescript debut, The Golden Bough.
The length of the songs, the grandeur of the lyrics, and the triumphal tone of the guitars have resulted in a lot of listeners trying to sneak around the whole power metal thing by calling The White Goddess “epic heavy metal.” I suppose that’s apt, even if the last thing we need is one more officially agreed upon metal subgenre. I still can’t help but read the use of that euphemism as shame. Power metal is as uncool a genre as there is, so there’s an instinct to hide from it when it does something awesome. Maybe simply calling Atlantean Kodex what they are — an excellent German power metal band — will start to turn the tides, and we won’t have to act so shocked the next time an album like this comes along. - Invisible Oranges, http://www.invisibleoranges.com/2013/10/atlantean-kodex-the-white-goddess/