Unleashing upon mine ears with one of the most blood-curdling and inventively layered and arranged intros I've ever heard, Rotting Christ signal with precise, detached confidence that the onslaughting 51 minutes of musicianly music is going to roil and roll remarkably indeed. Nothing will unseat Dark Tranquillity's Damage Done for me with respect to record of the year accolades, but this perches proudly around a distant second or third, Genesis clashing extreme and intellectual wits with Immortal's Sons Of Northern Darkness. Evoking various foreign characteristics slanting and slighting through the likes of Vader, Vintersorg, Zyklon and Moonspell and then filtering it through finicky, artsy constructs reminiscent of the groovy bits of Old Man's Child and Borknagar, Rotting Christ have built a cathedral of epic anthems here, most notable of which is the churning madness of 'Nightmare', which finds Sakis in Daemonarch/Moonspell mode over a rocky road riff until the chorus, where shafts of metal light stab through the clouds like vengeful heavenly firestorms. Elsewhere, the Greeks trip us out lock-step like In Extremo, providing smart symphonic touches buttressed by recurringly accessible riffs and incessant but seductive chants, even if the blastbeat bits sound like anybody else's clean, keyboardy blasted bits. All told though, very effective and oddly, more of everything all the time... more keyboards, more production, more groove, more lyrical venom, more brains, more magic metal moments, all wrapped in the accumulated knowledge of experience and complex, dynamic identity.