I always admired the overall attitude of Norway’s SATYRICON as they not only more or less stayed true to their roots, they are also one of the few, rare exceptions that didn’t musically sell out to the mainstream market like most of their (once) like-minded countrymen did. To celebrate the band’s ten year anniversary ever since the release of their classic “The Forest Is My Throne” demo, Moonfog Productions have just issued a compilation album of ten kinda representative SATYRICON tracks, some of them unavailable in this format elsewhere. I’m usually not the biggest fan of these kind of releases, as they mostly charge for stuff that a die hard fan of a band already owns. But on the other hand, nobody forces you to buy compilations just for one or two exclusives and they still remain a good opportunity for all those who weren’t familiar with the back catalogue of an already established band. Leaving this criticism behind, “Ten Horns – Ten Diadems” is certainly a good selection of SATYRICON material, covering two songs of each album as well as one off the “Megiddo” EP. Three of them got remastered exclusively for this compilation (which I couldn’t care less about…) and you’ll also get one previously unreleased track, entitled ‘Serpent’s Rise’ (basically an instrumental with some spoken parts) plus a very promising preview on the upcoming new studio album “Volcano”, entitled ‘Repined Bastard Nation’. The whole packaging of this release is kinda impressive – the CD comes in a deluxe looking box, while the booklet features all the lyrics and a bunch of unpublished SATYRICON pics from past and present. All in all definitely a fine appetizer to shorten the time until the release of “Volcano” on August 28, 2002. For all further info check out www.moonfog.com or www.satyricon.no.