Thy Mighty Contract＜Colored Vinyl＞

After recording a handful of demos and releasing 1991's Passage to Arcturo EP in their native Greece, Rotting Christ launched their international career with a promising first long-player in 1993's Thy Mighty Contract. Originally released by France's Osmose, the album's production may have been somewhat subpar, and its songs slightly over-reliant on furious blastbeats, but none of this mattered a lick to hardcore extreme metal fans, who happily gorged on such tasty black metal entrails as "The Sign of Evil Existence" and "The Coronation of the Serpent." After all, even at the start of their storied career, Rotting Christ already showed a budding flair for melody on odes of sublime terror like "Transform All Suffering into Plagues," "Exiled Archangels," and "The Fourth Knight of Revelation" -- and how about those horribly evocative titles? All told, these songs made a lasting first impression for Rotting Christ on the world stage, and the band would waste no time taking their dark, gloriously deviant art to dizzying new heights with their very next efforts. [Thy Mighty Contract was reissued by Century Media in 1998; expanded with two bonus tracks from the "Apokathelosis" single (the full-tilt onslaught named "Visions of the Dead Lover" and a meandering departure called "The Mystical Meeting"), and with its fourth and sixth songs ("Dive the Deepest Abyss" and "His Sleeping Majesty," respectively) swapped in the new sequence.] ~ Eduardo Rivadavia