Rotting Christ - The Heretics

Key Facts

Country: 🇬🇷
Genre: Melodic Black Metal
Release Date: 15th February 2019
Record Label(s): Season Of Mist

Band Members

Sakis Tolis – vocals, guitars, bass guitar, keyboards, percussion, production
Themis Tolis – drums

Production Personel

Tony Lindgren – mastering
Vyacheslav Smishko – artwork
George Emmanuel – engineering
Maximos Manolis – cover art
Jens Bogren – mixing

Rotting Christ - Fire, God and Fear

Review

Rating (out of 5🤘): 🤘🤘🤘🤘

Favourite Track(s): In The Name Of God, Ветры злые, Hallowed Be Thy Name, I Believe, Fire God And Fear, The Voice Of The Universe

The 32 year veteran Greek black metallers are back with killer album The Heretics. Creating atmosphere and poetry of a dark landscape that critically questions the power of God and Christianity to what would be considered the biggest of heresies in the medieval era, the album is dark, ominous and mysterious. Joining an elite few bands that have gotten ridiculously good at writing music and with the album's thematic identity, this is an incredibly focused and well written album that is sure to peak your interest in its subject matter. 

Musically, it carries on where 2016's Rituals left off yet is a bit lighter on the pounding and heavy riffs and decided to focus more on melody and giant symphonic style atmospheres. The album does still incorporate some of the elements that made Rituals a great album but strips them back to make space for the atmospheric choral vocals. The album still has a dark and heavy feel though, I love the slower more epic songs like Hallowed Be Thy Name and Dies Irae. These types of songs have a special resonance with me at the moment as I search for more epic and melodic sounding music from time to time. I think the mixture and contrast of narrational, speech level vocals in some of the songs makes the album feel very ritualistic and with the harsher and choral vocals in the background it adds an interesting depth and dynamic to the music. The ritualistic theme through the album also helps to compile this sense of mockery of the church and its sermons, the bands message becomes very obvious that the indoctrination of church follows kills a personal freedom of the soul. Whilst the theme is quite deep and open to interpretation, the music surrounding it, especially in the second half of the album becomes a very hypnotic and trance like state of affairs. This then reinforces their idea of how easy it is to get sucked into something like organised religion. Concepts aside, I think the band have put in a phenomenal effort to make sure the arrangement of each song is meticulous and detailed. I love the more melodic route the band has gone down, as it has clearly opened up some more possibilities for them to experiment. Overall the album is epic, very well written and put together with particular attention to the finer details, and leaves a lot of food for thought and interpretation with the message that the band are conveying. 

From a production standpoint, one thing I've noticed recently is that bands symphonic, power or otherwise are really making use of the sonic space that can be afforded to them and capitalising with soaring and epic atmospheres. This album fits that trend perfectly, especially in the second half of the album. Every song has a build up of layers that are built up perfectly (credit to the songwriting there) but the way they have been arranged makes it epic to behold. With the usual instruments thundering away below it, they give the choral vocals a strong foundation to fully express themselves in the space they've been given. The guitar tones don't sound like your traditional black metal type tones, it could be argued that they're more death metal or doom sounding as they have a good chunk of tone in the low and the mid ranges. I think this record bucks the trend for my dislike of clicky drum kicks as I think they've been well balanced with the main punch of the kick. Overall, the mix is pretty awesome on this album, everything sits perfectly.

Rotting Christ are legends of the extreme metal scene and I think this is a great album to be introduced to because of its depth and variety, there's a little bit of something that everyone can like. So, do yourself a favour and check out The Heretics now!

Rotting Christ - The Heretics