Agamendon
Nuclear Rodeo

May 2008
Released: 2008, Pure Steel Records
Rating: 2.0/5
Reviewer: Luxi Lahtinen

The current label (Pure Steel Records) of German melodic death metallers, Agamendon, calls the band´s 2nd album ´a new, melodic death metal masterpiece from Germany´. Well, despite how hard I would love to witness a new masterpiece of melodic death metal here, unfortunately I fail to see a masterpiece in this record even after some intense listening sessions.



Agamendon play a somewhat melodic death metal which tends to be a bit too monotonous and generic for my experienced, hard-boiled ears (in death metal). Sure, at best they can sound a very decent act actually; these German fellows brand of death metal comes across nicely heavy, partly grinding and it has lots of (Maiden-tinged) melodies thrown around all over their songs that should actually make a pretty decent sounding effort altogether. But it doesn´t. Namely NUCLEAR RODEO lacks of any kind of originality and is unfortunately relatively faceless and breathless content-wise. They do have a few good things going on here and there in their songs (songs like "Fallout" and "Invading" have actually lots of potentiality in both of them), but since it´s a well-done wholeness that counts - and that should make and leave the final, captivating impact on the listeners, it is missing from this album. And that´s kind of a shame because when one listens to these guys´ efforts for NUCLEAR RODEO, it´s somewhat easy to notice that they have at least tried to make an impressive album, but then failed halfway through toward the final outcome.



The band´s growler Dugi (he sounds great, by the way) reminds me of deceptively like a cross between Dave Rotten from Avulsed and Esa from Demigod (the demo era), now if that interests someone...