Friday, May 21, 2010

Rotting Christ - Khronos

Rotting Christ - Khronos
2000, Century Media Records

Trying to elicit an opinion of this band from most people is likely to result in a number of shrugs, careless asides, unstudied comments, etc. and there is a good reason for this: Rotting Christ have never really made a powerful, idiosyncratic statement of their own and thus they have never given their audience anything to latch onto and claim. And yet at the same time they do have a style of their own, colored as it is by their One Big Riff (see song five on this album, more on that later), even if it can be described often, in the abstract, as the delirious absence of all other band's styles. No, Rotting Christ sticks out like a sore thumb in any scene to me - the kind of obvious presence that only comes to bands that are waiting to release something really special and defining or slip out of the world altogether. In other words, they are surrounded with the phosphorescence that comes to bands that are either dying quickly or are burning to brand their name on the world: the amorphous nature of this attention-bringing glow is what makes it interesting. As I see it, Rotting Christ are not going to ever release anything that is groundbreaking or genre-defining...if they were planning on this, they would have done it by now. It's too late. But having said that, I would also like to casually mention that I consider this to be their second best album ever. I also wouldn't be surprised if it was their last.

Think about how difficult it must be to get shows around the world with a name like 'Rotting Christ', and then think about how long this band has been burdened with this completely obsolete moniker. Why didn't they change it along the way? Now, having been a disinterested follower of this band's progress through the years (starting at the very beginning, with their split 7'' with Sound Pollution, when they were a grind/noise band - at that time their name actually made sense), and always believing that their demo 'Satanas Tedeum' (later released on CD by somebody, somewhere) and their first two albums 'Passage to Arcturo' and 'Thy Mighty Contract' were their best material (I actually prefer the demo to everything else - it has a great, eerie atmosphere with its infernal choirs), I wasn't ever impressed with their later work (there are two listenable songs on 'Triarchy...' and then there is silence), being convinced that they were in a slow, painful decline into becoming a commercial rock entity, pimped out by the greasy hands of the Evil Empire, Century Media. Think again for a moment how difficult it must be for their record company to sell 'commercial' music from a band called Rotting Christ. The K-Marts and Wal-Marts in this country cry out in horror...I can hear them now. No, a band's name still means so much to some people...

And for the most part, this band didn't prove me wrong. I don't think I can even bear listening to their last two albums - not for a minute, not for a second. Maybe my aversion is unnatural, but I'm convinced I have better things to waste my time on. So this thing, flying in at my door rather unexpectedly (actually I requested it from CM, sorry - I wanted to give them yet another chance), was a welcome surprise. Well, the first half was...

You see, I also believe that Rotting Christ is incapable of writing an entire album's worth of good, listenable, moving songs. Sure, you say, lots of bands are like that...but is there any other band out there that is as good as Rotting Christ are at writing two or three really good songs, placing them at the beginning of an album, and then dragging their weary carcasses home to the end through five or so tracks of sterility? Name one of their albums where this is not the case - one of their releases where the ending songs live up to the promise of the beginning tracks. I dare you.

So then, consider the Big Riff of Rotting Christ: it appears here in the fifth song, 'Art of Sin', as I said above. If you are in any way a follower of this band you should know what I mean by this - that same little trill of the fingers that Sakis has been using as a melodic crutch since the first songs (it appears all over Thy Mighty Contract), and which he must be absolutely terrified to leave behind. Melodies come and go, new structures are formed and dissolve, Rotting Christ change their mannerisms, their postures, their style, their scene allegiance, and yet that riff remains...

The only reason I consider this their second best album (I place 'Thy Mighty Contract' before this based purely on nostalgia) is because of the opening song, the second song, and the sixth, 'Lucifer over London' (a perversion of Delacroix?), which are catchy, easy to listen to, and which adequately mix all the elements that they have been propounding through the last five years: the simple drumming, the keyboard/synth washes and layering, sound effects, melodic guitars, gothic posing, and that never-changing voice of Sakis. Supposedly this album was designed to highlight the new, sexy 'pure' Rotting Christ - tha band that was almost killed by an earthquake in Mexico, and which fled back to Greece to spit forth some brutal mayhem again. Not so - don't believe the hype. No, this is the same old band, the same tired formula...only they succeed in a few moments where they have failed before...and who really knows why? Perhaps it was just a matter of coincidence...