“Morbid Priest of Supreme Blasphemy”… FUCK YEAH! Now that’s a death metal album title if ever I heard one. Polish death metal crew Kingdom do not fuck around with their album titles, or their music for that matter. However, these guys don’t play anywhere near your average Polish styled, super clinical, super polished death metal. Kingdom are all about the gnarled, sickened, defiled and unholy dark side of death metal which is indebted as much to the likes of Incantation, as it is to the doomier side of Autopsy (as well as a handful of bands that spawned from the crunchier, morbid early 90s Finnish scene). Sound good? It should do, because this – the bands 2nd full length release – is an absolute belter of an album.
The first thing that strikes me about Kingdom’s overall vibe is that it sounds as though their instruments have been abused to such an extent that they’re barely being held together. The guitars & rattling bass sound as though they’ve been grinded so much that they’re about to be whittled down into their component parts of woodchips and wires – you can almost hear volume knobs rattling across the floor and trem bars clunking angrily off the walls as the riffs blast forth. The drums too sound as though they’re about to crumble apart, or roll out of the door in protest to maim a few people on the street outside with shards of flying wood and metal. The vocals have a satanic ‘hair drying’ harsh setting, which only ever seem to give way to an obscure, anciently eerie ‘whisper’ which is called upon only when the evil rating is to be clicked firmly ‘round to eleven.
“Beast of the Sea” is very much early Morbid Angel in its bombastic salvo, replete with harmonic dive-bombing and Trey Azagthoth-ian styled solo work and pick squeals, while “Nameless King” has a simplistic, almost Repulsion-like vibe to its pounding punkish gruesomeness. There’s a cover of Nihilist’s (or Entombed’s – depending on how kvlt you are), “Supposed to Rot”, which is tackled in the bands own inimitable style so as to flow seamlessly with the rest of the album’s vomit encrusted and blasphemous vibe. In fact, you can hear a lot of the Sunlight studios adoration in Kingdom’s overall sound, but it’s so bastardized and twisted that it’s somehow birthed into its own living, heaving mass of infected malignancy by way of the left hand path taken by Finns such as Convulse or Demilich.
This slimy, filth coated musical abhorrence is most definitely my thing, and I’d defy any death metal devotee not to lose their shit to this album. It blasts, it grinds, it broods – it does everything you want from a death metal album. But this has the extra spark, the almost tangible unwholesomeness which permeates the listener with each carnage-stuffed riff and horror-corroded growl. So, if a relatively unknown band can appear from the depths of Poland to make a miserable old git like me sit up and take serious notice, there’s still hope for the death metal scene yet.
(8.5/10 Lars Christiansen)
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