Description
Double album on red vinyls with gatefold cover and one bonus track. Limited 300 copies
I honestly wasn’t sure where Rotting Christ was going to go after their last album. We’ve seen there ups and downs and they’d seem to have finally found their comfortable plateau in recent years, so I wasn’t sure if we’d seen the end of trying new things from them and were instead going to see a lot of safe entries mirroring their successes like Theogonia and Kata Ton Daimona Eaytoy. Well Rituals is here to slap me in the face for thinking that as by far Rotting Christ’s most experimental album to date. And as you might expect from such an experimental venture there’s some good and bad to be found here. Rituals takes its name very seriously. Every song on the album is portrayed as a cultish ritual, beckoning otherworldly forces, just with more awesome guitars. This creates some truly dark and heavy songs but it also highlights one of the primary weaknesses. Because the lyrics are instead invocations of various entities (usually Satan, but there’s a few lesser known ones here) it results in a lot of repeating lines, and plodding tribal drumwork. To just tell it like it is I’ll say this. If you love Rotting Christ you’ll enjoy this album, it has its pros and cons but if you like the groups style there’s still plenty of it here; being dark, sinister and melodic. However, I think this is a bad place for a new listener to begin, they’re just trying too many new things here that aren’t indicative of their more standard style as a whole and it could be hard for someone to get into (or at least be misleading when they go into one of their more traditional albums). If you’re new I recommended the previously mentioned albums such as Theogonia as a better place to start. There are also some carefully chosen guests on this album. These has been added for better effect, including the spoken words of Nick Holmes (Paradise Lost) on A Voice Like Thunder and Samaels Vorph mesmerizingly quoting from Charles Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs Du Mal throughout the song Les Litanies De Satan. Goosebumps moments such as these are liberally sprinkled throughout the record, which manages the feat to sound rock solid and made out of one heavy piece as well as diverse and far ranging at the same time. The experienced is enhanced by Jens Bogren’s equally clear and transparent yet also massive as well as sombre mix and mastering at his widely renowned Fascination Street Studios.
Track listing:
1. In Nomine Dei Nostri
2. Ze Nigmar
3. Elthe Kyrie
4. Les Litanies De Satan (Les Fleurs Du Mal)
5. Apage Satana
6. Tou Thanatou
7. For A Voice Like Thunder
8. Konx Om Pax
9. Devadevam
10. The Four Horsemen
11. Loktar Ogar