(We present DGR‘s review of Pro Xristou, a new album by the Greek legends Rotting Christ that will be released by Season of Mist on May 24th.)
If you’ve been following Rotting Christ for some time now you’re likely well aware the in spite of some decent-sized gaps in time between albums the group are notoriously prolific; always with a song on hand for a small EP, the occasional one-off, sometimes even a book. They are a font of music, and one glance at an overall collected works reveals just how much has been created by the group over the course of a decades-spanning career.
Much of this is due to project mainman Sakis Tolis – the voice and guitar of the group – who has been one of, if not the, primary songwriter of the Greek black metal heathens for most of its existence. Since the release of 2010’s AEALO, Sakis has shown that he knows his way around a melodic and folk-leaning guitar riff. It had long been a part of Rotting Christ‘s sound and often is referenced as being part of a particular ‘era’ of the band – imagine having a group that has eras – but they really came to the forefront on AEALO, an album whereby Rotting Christ not only defined a sound but also became defined by it.
Photo by Chantik Photography
Since then, Rotting Christ releases have often iterated on that, but with every album you would likely have a general idea just how it was going to sound after AEALO; it was just a question of how much the band would add on to it and what direction they would take from there that made them interesting.
This has resulted in, strangely enough, Rotting Christ becoming both metal’s best-kept secret and best gateway band into more extreme genres. The name is enough to upturn many a nose, yet without telling people who they’re listening to, you could throw on “Fire, God, and Fear” from The Heretics or “Grandis Spiritus Diavolos” from Kata Ton Daimona Eaytoy – anglicizing Greek lettering is always fun in the way that your guaranteed to make yourself look profoundly stupid every single time – and they’d be nodding along without a care in the world.
The band have an uncomplicated and uncompromising style that if nothing else has had a relentlessly strong melodic hook to go alongside its martial rhythms. Rotting Christ albums have morphed into ‘going to battle soundtracks’ and it is something the band have leaned in on; the last three or four have had a few songs each wherein you get the clash of swords and shields, the cries of war echoing out before the guitar fades in.
Yet, in order to understand Rotting Christ‘s most recent album Pro Xristou we need to expand a little wider into something that we’ve referenced before and something that has also been increasingly prolific since the days of pandemic lockdowns, and that is the greater Sakis Tolis expanded musical universe.
Pro Xristou is not a heavy or crushing album in the way Rotting Christ have been in the past. In fact, it shares a lot of musical DNA with the wider works of Sakis over the past few years. In that time, he has not only put out new material with Thou Art Lord and recorded something more symphonic black metal leaning under the name χ ξ ς’ late last year, but also managed to put out a solo album and a few singles.
The solo album. Among The Fires Of Hell, was especially enjoyable, and the only mark you could put against it was a wish for it to have had the confidence to stand truly on its own. The opening parts of that disc are incredibly interesting as it took on goth and post-metal atmospheres, but as it went on it settled back into what Sakis knows how to write best, which is often music perfectly befitting a Rotting Christ album.
The lines blurred a little too much there, but it is that release and his keyboard-heavy melodic black metal project mentioned above that lend more of themselves to Rotting Christ‘s latest album than you’d expect. Listen to Among The Fires Of Hell and you can hear that the framework and ideas for many of the songs on Pro Xristou were already starting to be seeded.
We kid you not, then, when we say that Pro Xristou has all of the Rotting Christ hallmarks you might otherwise expect. If we had some sort of bingo card available for it, that thing would be a square piece of paper with a giant empty hole in the center. Rotting Christ throw everything that has defined them in recent years into this album. Nearly every song has a spoken-word intro, there are plenty of opportunities to join the band in yelling ‘HAIL!’, there’s a heavier focus on sing-along choirs, and even the barely-hanging-on maddening female vocal work that has been a bigger part of the band since Rituals is here.
Seriously, if you enjoyed the song “Les litanies de Satan (Les fleurs du mal)” from Rituals then do we have a deal for you on Pro Xristou because there is a lot of that style of songwriting throughout the album. However, the style of Rotting Christ you’re really going to have to enjoy in order to bite into Pro Xristou like a rare steak is the mid-tempo, heavily melodic, and meditative style that Rotting Christ have employed more and more on recent discs.
This is the most arena-worthy Rotting Christ have been in some time. Many of these songs have big lead-guitar lines – again, a credit to the band, as they’re experts at creating earworms in that aspect – and a mid-tempo stomp. There’s only a few songs wherein drummer Themis Tolis has the opportunity to move above a mid-tempo, swaying stomp and into a stage-floor-melting one-two assault.
Yet given Pro Xristou‘s slower nature, it’s still an enjoyable album. Not as black leather jacket, arm guard, or t-shirt wearing as you might expect, but one that in its slower going is strangely relaxing. Verging right on the edge of nice bubble bath, glass of wine, and ten different songs – twelve with the bonus songs – that approach the idea of the world before christ. Even the song “Yggdrasil” with its hailing of many gods, doesn’t get too overwhelmingly crazy.
This disc, like mentioned above, is quite sing-along worthy instead. Pro Xristou is an album where you’ll be humming the guitar lines throughout the day, even if you’ve long moved on to something else listening-wise. It’s Rotting Christ‘s best perfomance trick and goddamn do they do it alot here. While we would’ve appreciated more earth-ending rumble, we’re still suckers aplenty for big choirs as well.
In closing: a proposal. What if we treated Pro Xristou as if it had a different name? The sheer number of albums and eras of Rotting Christ that we’ve referenced in this writeup means that there is definitely a throughline in the massive collective of works that’ve appeared in the wider Rotting Christ musical world over the years. What if, like Hate did with Solarflesh, we viewed Pro Xristou more along the lines of an album like Rituals, because it is hard to shake the idea that Pro Xristou is Rituals part II. A Rituals II: Pro Xristou or something along those lines.
Rotting Christ‘s focus on large group chants throughout, the staid songwriting tempo, and the multi-pronged approach to the idea of the world ‘before christ’ makes Pro Xristou feel like a ten-song ritual of its own. The meditative and slow nature of many of the songs and the ritualistic approach to the vocal work is hard to define otherwise. Pro Xristou isn’t the most intense Rotting Christ album by a mile, it’s actually fairly relaxing, but in the sense that Rotting Christ are really, really, really hammering on the idea of looking inwards instead of to religion for belief. It is Ritualistic in that aspect, because you do wind up giving yourself over to a musical greater ‘whole’ for a bit – but one that insists on the idea of no Christian religion and instead focuses on the idea of man.
https://shopusa.season-of-mist.com/band/rotting-christ
https://orcd.co/proxtristoupresave
https://linktr.ee/Rotting_Christ
https://rottingchrist.bandcamp.com/album/pro-xristou