Argus Megere are a Romanian black metal band and this is their fifth album.
Cerburea Apusului is the long awaited follow up to 2017’s VEII. It may have been a while since their last record, but Argus Megere have certainly not aged poorly. There’s a lot to absorb across Cerburea Apulsului. This is an album that’s easy to enjoy upon first experience, but it really settles into its own natural rhythms after repeated spins.
Cerburea Apulsului juxtaposes resplendent post-rock moodbuilding and luscious folk textures against cold second wave venom and caustic aggressive vitriol. Progressive urges can be felt in places, working wonderfully alongside everything else. This is all set within an expressive atmospheric black metal framework that allows Argus Megere to roam far and wide in search of their own specific flavour of soundscape. They find it too.
The melodic work on these songs is transportive. It shimmers with radiant beauty, while also eschewing surface appeal. Instead, it’s imbued with rich feeling, enabling the music to open doorways to emotive depths that would otherwise remain closed. Cerburea Apulsului is awash with emotion not only because of its capable grasp of melody, but in the application of the rest of its instrumentation also. A large part of this comes courtesy of the keyboard enhancements, but I also want to mention the array of traditional folk instruments that are used; these can sometimes sound shoehorned in on similar releases, but here they are deployed and integrated well.
The vocals are as varied and textured as the rest of the music. There are harsh screams and and rough roars, but also clean singing of a few different styles. Most operate on the folk metal side of things, but there are also a few more epic cleans that are pitched somewhere between those of folk metal and epic heavy metal in style, striking the right balance for my tastes. Occasionally, they even venture into Paradise Lost-esque doom metal territories, while at others they are their own thing entirely.
Argus Megere have offered up a strong album on Cerburea Apusului. It’s well-written, delivered with skill and passion, and very immersive. If you have a taste for multifaceted, progressive/folk-influenced atmospheric black metal, then this must surely be high on the agenda for you.
Wonderbox Metal 