Band:	Tiamat
Album:	Judas Christ
Style:	Atmospheric gothic metal
Release date:	2002

Spinae
01. The Return Of The Son Of Nothing
02. So Much For Suicide
03. Vote For Love
04. The Truth's For Sale

Tropic Of Venus
05. Fireflower
06. Sumer By Night
07. Love Is As Good As Soma

Tropic Of Capricorn
08. Angel Holograms
09. Spine
10. I Am In Love With Myself

Casadores
11. Heaven Of High
12. Too Far Gone
13. Cold Last Supper [US bonus]

The Hamburg Tapes
14. Sixshooter [bonus]
15. However You Look At It You Loose [bonus]
+ Vote For Love [video]

Tiamat is one of those bands that start out either as necro grim pandas or savage guitar mashers, but over time, for reasons known only to them, completely abandon that style for much softer, even poppy forms of gothic rock/metal or depart even further, into genres and classifications unknown (Ulver, I'm lookin' at you here). While I'm not much of a fan of Tiamat's early works, their dabble in the fields of gothic has produced some interesting results, namely Wildhoney and A Deeper Kind of Slumber. After that, the band decided to treat us with typical goth rock with hit-or-miss albums. Judas Christ is, unfortunately, more miss than hit.

Unless you take your sweet time analyzing just what the heck Edmund tried to say with the album title, Judas Christ jumps straight on the point, with no needless introductions or redundant intros. And that's pretty much what you may expect from the rest of the album: straightforward, simplistic, catchy, keyboard-addled gothic rock. Actually, I stand corrected. The album is certainly not catchy or good during its entire length. And that's the thing that stops Pontius Pilates Christ, err, Judas Christ from being a truly memorable album: inconsistency. Some tracks are just plain awesome, no doubt about that, with even hints of brilliance. And then again, while listening to some others, I couldn't help but think how even fart jokes would have been a more entertaining use of disk space.

Example: the awesomeness of the bittersweet, melancholic dirge featured in the two opening tracks is so easy to forget when "Vote For Love" hits you in the face with its pop and cheese factors going through the roof, or when you're left yawning because of "Love is as Good as Soma's" and "Fireflower's" just plain boring and unmoving droning. Then again, there are a number of pretty good tracks: the more up-tempo and up-beat "Angel Holograms" and "I am In Love With Myself", or the acoustic lullaby of "Too Far Gone". However, none of them reach the quality of the first two tracks, which tends to put a serious damper on the listening experience.

Passing final judgment on Weird Album Title, err, Judas Christ is one serious bitch. Do you praise only the good sides and ignore the bad, or do you mercilessly blast it with all your godly power of a reviewer ('cause, y'know, the Earth revolves around our opinions)? In this case, neither. I'll just say that the album is composed of a couple of standout tracks, mostly average/OK ones and a couple of god-awful ones. Just like every Tiamat album after A Deeper Kind of Slumber...