Look, I’m not going to waste your time – if you read no further than this, reckon on these words: This album is great.
I’m a sucker for angular, weird death metal. Now don’t get me wrong – I can be a meat and potatoes death metal guy too. Sure, I like a good solid riff, a slightly daft motif and a mid-tempo, down-tuned chug the same as the next guy. Push me, though, and I’m going to say that some of my favourite death metal has been of the more unexpected, weird, strange variety. I love the Unanimated stuff, those first couple of pretty avant-garde At The Gates albums, the cavernous sounding The Chasm albums. Seems to me that these days, they’re pretty hard to come by. Patrick Jensen is more likely to be writing The Haunted tracks than to ever appear on another “Saltrubbed Eyes”.
Pale King are wilfully obscure in sound, decidedly non-traditional in their death metal songwriting chops, and have a throw back production that’s (I suspect) purposefully murky and oppressive. It’s weird, it’s mysterious and I bloody love it. If the music here was represented as a human figure, it would have six knees and elbows where there should not be elbows. It has musical spirals that emerge suddenly, then fractally spike off in different directions, before ending as suddenly as they begin. The song crafting has had the rule book cast into the wind, and the pages flap about pointlessly under the musical assault that capers around it.
I’d hesitate to call this album a breath of fresh air, per se – more like a stygian blast of funeral fog – but I defy any hardened or even cynical long-term listener to our extreme brand of musicality, and not raise an eyebrow at some of the off-kilter drumming on the title track, or the lurching, sprawling riffing on “The Curse”. It’s a brilliantly contained album, despite the odd stuff occurring all over the place, being over in a little over 40 minutes, which is the perfect length for the eight tracks to occur. Here and there, the curious magic of the Morbid Tales era Celtic Frost is invoked, if not exactly in sound, then in the spirit of a band who really just don’t care what they are supposed to sound like, and are doing their own thing. It seems really incongruous to describe an album that contains songs which can have the moribund atmosphere of the blackest black metal, the heft of the best death metal and a pop section that wouldn’t be out of place on a vintage AHA number (I’m serious – check out “The Curse” for more details) as a joyful experience, but it really is.
Will you like the echo-heavy hoarse vocals? The weird clicky and dry drum sound, the somewhat thin guitars and the rumbling bass, along with a production that may have been produced by a blind-drunk producer prodding about with buttons and levers in a bought of frenzied binge-drinking? It shouldn’t work. It really shouldn’t. At this point in the game, we know how this kind of music is. We know how it ticks. We know how the rules work.
Pale King: no rules. Pale King: rule.
(9/10 Chris Davison)
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