Devour All the Living Things

At some point while Rhinocervs was in the process of fading out of existence, this strange little compilation was made in extremely limited quantities. It was the last Rhinocervs release I ever tracked down, and only after fastidious effort (thankfully more effort than money, unlike the three-digit price I paid for RH-16). To this day I'm not really sure why this was made; it doesn't seem to serve any purpose that I can figure out, seeing as it was rarer than any of the releases it samples from. Who knows, though. Just another one of life's little mysteries.

You get a wide variety of material from every single modern project that's directly affiliated with Rhinocervs. The cuts are generally good, but not great: after years of listening to all of these tracks, I think, e.g., "Mythology" is the choice cut from Tukaaria's side of the split with Odz Manouk, and not the included "Suspensions". Same for "The Sloth" being Odz Manouk's track here and not "The Scavenger" or "The Esophagus". In fact, the RH-15 track included here is probably the worst they ever made. The only tracks here that I think are the best from their respective releases are the RH-12 track and the RH-14 track. So from a quality perspective, I'm not entirely sold on this release as it doesn't function as a "best of", in my opinion.

Well, what about pulling rare cuts? Well that take doesn't really work either. All of the tracks were previously released, as it states on the can. Some of these were even already featured on the Odour of Dust & Rot compilation, namely the Absum and Glossolalia songs. Even if that compilation was those songs' only feature, why bring them back up again for a different compilation? MA edit history shows that Rhinocervs co-founder A., under the username "glossolalia", added some releases to the Absum and Glossolalia band pages that either don't really exist or are so rare that they have never been uncovered. Why not feature that stuff here if you want to add value to the release? Nothing here is especially "rare" in the Rhinocervs scheme of things, and in fact they pulled two tracks from the Odz Manouk/Tukaaria split, which was re-released via Profound Lore to the tune of 500 copies. Certainly that would put it at the bottom of the list when it came to selecting releases to include.

Well, maybe the focus was availability. Maybe they just figured that the original tapes were all limited edition, mostly sold out, and they wanted to give people a chance to hear them without spending a shitton of money. Well, no, that approach doesn't work either, for two reasons. Firstly: digital forms of the music existed, not only on YouTube but also on a briefly uploaded official Bandcamp for the entire label which appeared shortly after this tape's existence was announced. This was clearly not going to be the only feasible way to hear these tracks going forward. Second, and perhaps more importantly, I highly doubt more than 50 copies of this tape were ever made. It took a long time for me to find even two listed for sale years after the original "release" date. This was not going to reach anybody who didn't already own the entire collection of Rhinocervs material, like I do.

Finally, I feel like one of the biggest strengths of Rhinocervs - the duo's ability to wholly immerse themselves in a new atmosphere and produce many albums which sounded entirely different - works to their disadvantage in a V/A compilation format. It worked on Odour of Dust & Rot, where the individual songs from all the projects could still be judged to be cut from the same cloth. Later, however, Rhinocervs would shift from Burzum worship to Blut aus Nord-inspired ferocity to Finndeath to ambient with every release. On this comp, songs that were powerful and emotive in an album context are pitted directly against tracks with totally different production, mood, and quality, leaving them feeling like an improperly planned split release. Also, if we are just going for a sampler platter approach, where's Nihilobstat, RH-01 and RH-16? Maybe the latter wasn't complete yet when this was actually "released". Either way, although the music is mostly great as Rhinocervs material tends to be, the presentation of this material offers nothing new, and worst of all, the actual release is so rare that its street price will ensure it only falls into the hands of a select few like me who are already obsessed with the band. As a release, this is worthless. It's the "randomize playlist" button turned into a tape. Nobody will ever actually listen to this, and that's a good thing. Go listen to the original albums!