Band:	Rotting Christ
Album:	Pro Xristou
Style:	Black metal
Release date:	May 2024

01. Pro Xristoy (Προ Χριστού)
02. The Apostate
03. Like Father, Like Son
04. The Sixth Day
05. La Lettera Del Diavolo
06. The Farewell
07. Pix Lax Dax
08. Pretty World, Pretty Dies
09. Yggdrasil
10. Saoirse
11. Primal Resurrection [bonus]
12. All For One [bonus]

Rotting Christ return with at least one (and only one) new riff, one less number of new ideas than riffs, and, shit, we're already in the negative numbers. Does a recycled riff or lyric count as -1 new one? In that case, the number of news on Pro Xristou quickly leads us below the set of natural numbers.

I'm frantically searching for a former review of mine to shamelessly copy and paste into this article, but the only other album I've rated as low as this one is that Wizardthrone disaster. Wait a minute… never mind, I thought I was wrong but turns out I was wrong about that. Actually, I was wrong about being wrong about being wrong about that, because 5/10 is too not-bad for an album that's already been done three times before, and still manages to end up the very worst of the worst lot.

In this review, you will find the same things said several times with (possibly) different words, you will find totally made-up word-phrases that turn basic ideas into something barely readable, and you'll find out why you should spend a free hour of your life on something other than what I've now suffered through multiple times like annually returning to a Bacchanalia that simply never turns into that mass orgy the preachers marketed it as.

Let's try to enter band mastermind Sakis Tolis’ headspace for a quickie, shall we? Fire rhymes with desire rhymes with higher rhymes with empire rhymes with liar rhymes with fire rhymes with desire rhymes with higher rhymes with… “Blood for blood and tooth for tooth” made no sense as a phrase last time around so let's try already used lyrics in another context and see if it works better. Nobody said it had to be a different context. The result: worse cohesion, and now also embarrassing to even hear. The main hook in “Xibalba” worked well four albums ago, on Kata Ton Daimona Eaytoy, and nobody even noticed it was already then just the minutest variation on an unsubtle blend of a couple of melodies off Aealo.

A decade later, however, and nobody ain't fooling nobody, especially considering that the same recycled hook not only gets to drive yet another song, but is even inter-albumily plagiarised and turns up here and there, as if it wasn't enough to just reuse ideas from older albums in these new songs but even reusing the new songs’ reusing of said reused ideas from older albums on more than one song on the new album; in essence recycling the recyclement of a recycled idea by recycling the recycled part in one recycled song for use in a second recycled song on the same recycled album, or even recycling the recycled recyclement in more than one recycled song, turning the worst recyclings into recycled arrangements of recycled parts from older albums pieced together with recycled recyclements from older albums as recycled on newer albums and topping it all off by recycling these recycled parts of older recyclements of even older recycled parts as recycled on the recycled songs on this very same recycled album I'm recycling - sorry, reviewing - at the moment.

The χξς-01-BC Self-Plagiarisator Pro™ works fine once or twice, assuming usage of the separately sold - and ridiculously cheap, not to mention available for free if you're upgrading from the previous version, which is derivative of the pre-previous version to the degree you'll find at most a single-digit amount of new presets created by users of the pre-pre-previous version but only added now because of carefully comatose-calibrated chord progressions and consciously curated cat-turd-complexity-ceiling creative constipation combined into an according to DSM-V hitherto unacknowledged and quasiscientific syndrome only known as 4CPnCT4C, made (in)famous by Rotting Christ for the mediocrity achieved and disappointment caused worldwide with their three, now four, latest albums - Χαίρε-666-Σατανά™ v4.0 expansion pack. This setup at least tends to blend the main input motif to be recycled with a new rhythm pattern or vocal delivery added on its auxiliary line-in channels, which when Pluto is aligned with Saturn and Mercury is in retrograde has a nonzero probability of resulting in a barely-worthy-of-the-descriptor-borderline-new-but-eh-whatever-we're-expecting-no-more-and-no-less-so-fine-they-get-away-with-it-just-this-once-or-possibly-even-twice song.

Moving on from the sheer technicalities of the decade-rotting Rotting Christ songwriting method, let's just marvel at Pro Xristou; an unofficial Greeklish spelling of Προ Χρίστου (Before Christ) that will ensure that any listener’s erroneous pronunciation of the album title will rival the ubiquitous dubiousness of Sakis’ English - and probably other - vocals. Just note that the ‘χ’ is a guttural fricative rather than a ‘ks’ and you'll end up on the winning team.

I jest, I jest. There is no winning team. A new listener will hardly be convinced by this fourth and least inspired iteration of whatever Aealo (on which the band still had that creative spark that made Theogonia such a must-admit-as-contender-for-a-spot-near-the-very-apex-of-meloblack masterpiece of an album) set in motion to crystallise on Kata Ton Daimona Eaytoy. Nor will an old listener find any joy in this album apart from the possibility of a drinking-upon-the-spotting-of-recycled-content game, but it's just as likely to end up causing cirrhosis of the liver. Nor will any casual fan of of meloblack in general find any reason to pick Pro Xristou in favour of mostly any other meloblack album, particularly among the band’s previous discography, of which this album is not only the worst - no, the worst ones are the four latest ones - but this one is the worst of the worst. Nor will any fan of any kind of metal find… okay, enough recycling for one day, now, perhaps.

There is simply no reason at all - neither good nor bad - to give this album a listen. There is one (1) single riff that does sound somewhat inspired, being a melancholic, subdued modernisation of the kind of atmospheric and memorable riffs Rotting Christ won most people's hearts with on their pre-Khronos, melody-driven gothic-era albums, which you will find on the moderately adequate song “The Farewell”. Still recycled, though.

Each and every other indistinguishable song, numbingly repetitive section, blatantly recycled riff or child’s play chugging pattern that fails to even qualify as a riff, mid-paced and lazily dumbed down drum pattern, lead melody not even bothering enough to count as a ghost of a forgettable inglorious past, tired and unconvincing vocal delivery, unnecessary and incomprehensible spoken word, epically failing at sounding remotely epic three-chord choral arrangements, bass guitar lines purely cloned from the already cloned guitar riffs, and last but not least the audacity to reuse to a tee even lyrics and their methods of delivery from various parts of the previous three albums (who in turn, recall, follow the very same process described above based on those albums’ predecessors, all the way back to Aealo).

Just to add some ebola to your presumed malaria that a little too late for proper treatment turned out to be ear-canal cancer-AIDS, the motifs reused are rarely even the few good and memorable ones, but tired chugging, that same descending guitar lick, cringey spoken word passage, or rehashed rhyming patterns that weren't even original the very first time around.

Taken out of context, Pro Xristou is pure snooze metal; note how I named only one song - that's because any other namedrop could as well be any other, other namedrop, and not solely from just this album's tracklist but spanning four albums worth of recycling. Judged on its own, it's still an average at best album. However, a band of Rotting Christ’s longevity, popularity, influence, and standing cannot be judged out of context, and so my final verdict is a number printed in a colour rarely seen on Metal Storm, and that hopefully very few future albums will deserve, because we as listeners deserve better music than whatever this patchwork of the shit the garbage dump collector didn't manage to scrape off the bottom of the container, and that shit gets dustier for every year unless taken care of, polished, and reassembled into something else than the trash that was thrown in there in the first place.

If you really want to waste an hour of your life in one of the least meaningful ways possible, I recommend staying far away from this album, because not only will you lose an hour of your life, you'll have to spend the rest of the day listening to music that hopefully reignites your faith in metal, and that's a full workday in the recycle bin just because you didn't heed my warning. Just don't pick Rotting Christ’s recycle bin for this endeavour, or you'll quickly end up in metal-listening debt with -4 albums to do just to start over from scratch.

Fuck, man, this album pisses me off, and not in the “fuck the world, this made my day and I can handle anything knowing how awesome metal can be” kind of way, but in the “fuck Rotting Christ, I'll need a day just to recover from hearing how bad metal can be”.

Highly recommended... to stay the hell away from.