[Reaper16]

16.) Necros Christos – Doom of the Occult


I’m having trouble describing why I like this album so much. I’ve listened to it a bunch this year, and it still holds up. This is a conventional death metal album in some ways, and in other ways it is baffling and strange. About half of the songs are really enjoyable mid-paced death metal, and the other half are instrumental interludes built off of Greek and Hungarian musical phrasing. And never the twain shall meet in this album, leaving the value here entirely to juxtaposition. But it works, somehow. Strangely. No one song is a representative sample of this album, but the shifts in mood, the rough transitions from sitar interlude to mid-paced guitar riffing, all work in an album-length context.