This Australian band contains members of The Amenta, Fuck I’m Dead, Eaten By Rats, Werewolves, The Red Shore and The Day Everything Became Nothing. With this in mind you would have thought they could have picked a better moniker than King. Yep, it’s a bit crap, no gods, no masters and all that. Luckily regal titles aside the music here is far from shoddy and with the calibre of the other acts in mind this should come as no surprise.
Musically this is described as blackened death and the third album by the band starts with a nice blues-grass sounding intro, setting up visions of ‘Mist’ spreading over expansive vistas. From here we are pitched into a fairly familiar place, although in a very different continent, that being the imaginary realm of Blashyrkh. Yep the frigid touch of Immortal is all over this whirlwind of fury. It’s not all cold though as we traverse a ‘Volcano’ popping its top and spewing out molten musical lava, complete with anthemic backing Bathory sounding vocal croons and really hitting the hot-spot. Tony Forde’s craggy rasps and the storming guitar leads here are excellent and there’s stacks of invigorating energy throughout the album. There’s also a touch of audaciousness too, I mean calling a track ‘Mountains Of Ice,’ talk about nailing your influences to the door. Listening to this you are going to be imagining orange squeezing antics at the summit and then a slalom-course all the way to the bottom as someone who has had too much schnapps takes a slippery dive. Despite all this I am not complaining in the slightest as its played with such conviction you can’t help being swept along by it all.
This feel of being in the heart of winter spreads into the second half like the embrace of a blanket of snow. There’s a touch of bands like Insomnium and Moonsorrow in the melodic thrust of songs such as ‘Once And For All,’ enthused by plenty of fist pumping bravado. The band play like the clappers and the melodic drive is nothing short of immense. Drummer David Haley injects a massive assault of blasting on ‘Into The Fire’ and there’s absolutely no tempering the flames here. Riffs form into crystalline shards on ‘Death In The Cosmos,’ compulsively glistening, full of majesty and might. Foot-stomping heavy metal glory rides strong on ‘Crepuscular’ and one gets the feeling that not only are the band in their element they are having great fun with it too. This ten track epic ends with ‘To The Stars’ and it’s a race to space that even on just one listen should have hooked you right into its nebular charms and make you want to play it again pretty much immediately.
I can almost forgive them for that name, although not quite. It certainly sets them up for clichéd closing statements about sitting firmly astride their Winter-thrones but with this album that’s exactly where they reside. Into glory ride!
(8.5/10 Pete Woods)
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