Review by Rexorcist for Rotting Christ - Triarchy of the Lost Lovers (1996)

The first two Rotting Christ albums, Thy Might Contract and Non Serviam, built themselves on a dirtier sound and a plethora of riffs, while the first one favored riffs over structure and the second album was a slim improvement in structure and production.  While I liked them, they weren't necessarily the legendary albums I was hearing about.  In fact, I even started these first three albums a couple of times in the hopes of that PERFECT melo-death album for my top 100 metal albums, and they didn't deliver due to sameyness.  But now I'm getting through them, and I'm mostly satisfied with what they did, but this third album is closest to living up to its legend than the other two were.

The third work, Triarchy of the Lost Lovers,  doesn't have dense blackened backgrounds, but rather clean and crystal production, allowing the percussions and the guitars do the talking as they are.  No noise factor, no reverb.  All clarity.  Even when the blast beats are going at their fastest and when the guitars are at their noisiest like in Shadows Follow, the whole thing is straightforward.  This is about the band, not the engineering.  Early on, the band shows off a much needed boost in layout structures balanced out with clever riffs, and a lot of those take the stage in both verse and solo.  As well, the sound is less darkened and more melodic, which means the band is trying to shift their focus, and it works out quite well.  And while many songs share some of the same ideas, the band is branching out into other emotional territories and more tempos as well, when the first two albums were quite samey and used production and technicality, as well as short length, to justify what skill they had.  While it's not as dirty and muddy, and more akin to standard black metal, the sound itself is fully justified by the extra boost in creativity and cleverness. And while the lengths of the songs are a little longer, this time, the band can fully justify the lengths without feeling incomplete because their songwriting has gotten that much better from the debut.

I get why so many people love this album, and I'll bet the Greek metal underground is more than happy to have this album representing their country while influencing an extreme metal scene of their own.  This is the most fun of the classic three albums, and shows several steps forward for the band.

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