Description

Official Portuguese tape. Black cassette with grey text. Limited 100 copies

The lone surviving band and the most known (alongside Vlad Tepes, Belketre) of the much underrated Les Legions Noires. Rattenkönig is the fourth full-length album from Mutiilation, arriving about a decade after the band’s debut record. This album maintains the dark and mournful style of Black Metal that Meyhna’ch had become known for, despite the number of changes since the early years. Though it possesses several of the same flaws that plagued the previous record, it comes off as a much more solid and consistent effort, overall. First off, the guitars are not loud in the mix like the previous album ‘Majestas Leprosus’ and the riffs are good. Production-wise its clean (at least by LLN standards) but not polished. Meyhna’ch’s voice is a low growl which fits the music on this album well as opposed to his majestic screaming on ‘Remains Of A Ruined, Dead, Cursed Soul’. While it does not compare to the older material, it still seemed like an improvement as far as the later stuff was concerned. There is no real epic sense of going on a journey through Hell or anything of that nature. Instead, the entirety of this record is like the death throes of a being that is simply wallowing at the depths of suffering, with no sense of hope. Meyhna’ch does well the create an utterly miserable record that feeds the negativity and anguish of the listener and even encourages the spilling of blood in the nocturnal hours. The songwriting succeeds in coming off as more cohesive than that of Majestas Leprosus, and the album flows better, sounding as if more thought went into the arrangement of each track. Rattenkönig is a solid album, though it represents even more of a disconnect with the old days. Whereas the last record still contained a few ideas that hearkened back to the band’s classic period, Mütiilation had certainly evolved into something else by this point. This is not a release for someone just getting into the band, nor is it an album that is likely to appeal to anyone seeking a sound similar to the demos or other early releases. Nonetheless, it offers the same type of melancholic Black Metal that Meyhna’ch spent so many years cultivating and is worth a listen.

Track listing:
1. That Night When I Died
2. Testimony Of A Sick Brain
3. The Bitter Taste Of Emotional Void
4. Black Coma
5. The Pact (The Eye Of The Jackal)
6. The Ecstatic Spiral To Hell
7. I, Satan’s Carrion
8. Rattenkönig