The background of TARTHARIA seems quite weird to me. As far as I found out, the band hails from St. Petersburg, the residential city of the Russian czars, but is now re-located to Finland. According to the glorious Metal Archives, the band consists only of Igor Anokhin (formerly in PRIME EVIL and INSIDE) right now. The fact is: TARTHARIA released three albums and a bunch of demos and EPs in the first ten years of their existence. Along with their newest album "Bleeding For The Devil", their new company Phantom Pain will release a compilation of songs from this decade. I can’t say anything about the new album here, but I can state for sure that this compilation, named "Flashback – X Years In Hell" is nothing less than redundant. The opener ‘Erotic Mutations’ already sounds like a mix of CHILDREN OF BODOM and pure boredom. In the first moments of ‘Abstract Nation’ I thought of Mille singing here. But if he really did, he wasn’t in control of himself, for a clear minded Mille would not have sung on a wishy washy keyboard contaminated wanna-be Black Metal song. After four more songs passed me by without leaving serious damages to my rotten soul, ‘Abnormal Sense’ made me scream in pain with those Gothic impositions and some weird folklore included. Definitely a lowlight. Thank Lemmy, the next three songs won’t do any harm until ‘Horror Without Name’ turns out to be a bright spot with clear vocals brightening up the grey skies. But this little sunbeam gets destroyed by ‘Over The Top’ – what a shit! Confused industrial keyboards meets aimless songwriting. The final ‘Breaking The Gates Of Hell’ is not really better and closes one of the most annoying compilations of the last years. A compilation full of superfluous music somewhere between Death Metal, clinical sounds, bugging keyboards, Black Metal and redundancy. For those unswerving: http://tarthariaofficial.bandcamp.com, www.myspace.com/tartharia