Metal Underground.com

Edging ever closer towards 30 years (!) as a band, Rotting Christ is an act that’s seen the ups and downs of the music industry, and been around for much of metal’s evolution. Keep that key word in mind, because “Kata Ton Daimona Eaytoy” likely won’t be what anyone is expecting, showing off a sound that is quite unexpected for a Greek outfit called Rotting Christ. The band isn’t sitting still with only one style, and this latest output propels its sound into a new arena that will draw in some fans from unexpected sources.

Halfway through the opening track “In Yumen – Xibalba” the audience is going to start having suspicions that things aren’t what they seem, and by the time the next track is nearing its end, baffled listeners will be forgiven if they think, “Wait a minute, isn’t this supposed to be black metal or something?” Nope. Not even close; in fact, other than the presence of some genre standard blast beating, the album sounds much more like Ex Deo than like Emperor.

Nearly every song is defined by repeating chants and drum beats that cross past an occult feel into what is probably best described as a “tribal” sound. It may not be as dark, but the entire disc is more epic in scope than Rotting Christ’s more black metal-tinted early efforts. Fifth track “Cine Iubeste Si Lasa” in particular throws in extra operatic elements with the tribal chanting, along with some female vocal work, to create a sound more akin to film score music than death metal.

For all the grand, sweeping sounds, the album is actually surprisingly sparse on the instrumentation (with the notable exception of the bonus track “Welcome to Hel”). The overall structure and style is actually fairly simplistic, even if the implantation gives the feeling of glistening “300”-style legions marching towards war. While it works well on individual songs, there is a downside: the chug-chug, scream-scream, chant-chant formula gets a little repetitive across the whole disc. That being said, Rotting Christ’s new sound is a successful experiment in melodic, tribal death metal that mostly hits all the right marks and expands the band’s horizons.