Aealo

Greece’s Rotting Christ are one of the longest-lived black metal bands from their part of the world. This, their tenth album, is their masterpiece. Founder and main creative voice Sakis Tolis blends black metal with a much heavier death metal sound, and adds elements from traditional Greek music, most notably a four-member female chorus who wail like damned souls on five tracks and a solo female singer, Evi Stergiou, on a track whose title translates to “Demons’ Food.” But the album’s grand finale is the true shocker: an interpretation of Diamanda Galás’s “Orders From The Dead,” using her original a cappella vocal performance from her 2003 album Defixiones: Will And Testament, with traditional Greek percussion, the aforementioned female vocalists, and industrial metal instrumentation added to turn it into a nightmarish masterpiece somewhere between remix and cover.