| CD REVIEW Kingdom |
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Band : Kingdom In Spring of last year, three members of the already legendary Gent based Post-Hardcore/ Trance / Doom act Amenra (namely bassist/ singer Colin H Van Eeckhout, guitarist/ backing singer Mathieu Van De Kerckhove, and drummer Vincent Tetaert) decided to get together for a jam of pure sludgery, and came out with three songs which were even slower, more omnicent…also more threathening…than they’d ever done before! They swiftly made a demo of the songs, which was picked up by the Genet label (also Gent based) for official release before the guys were even able to circulate the demo properly. News about that transpiring in July of last year, it was about time this release finally saw the day of light. In the meantime Tetaert (whom also left Amenra) was replaced by Tim Byron (also providing backing vocals). Due to the rather busy schedule of their main band, Kingdom hasn’t had that many occasions yet to play live, nor to compose new songs (at the three gigs they played, the boys just brought a rendition of their demo, really), but reviews of these shows were all, without exception, overwhelmingly positive! The EP, or mini-album if you like, only lasts a good 23 minutes, most of which is taken in by the 14:07 opening “Cendre”. A rather tough track, as it starts out with a 5-minute monotone drone before the bass comes in to bring in some down-paced variation, and almost another minute before the drums start kicking in at equally melodramatic slow pace. At 6:30 Mathieu steps on the distortion effect pedal and the song bursts loose, Colin screaming off his head (with some melancholic backing) in the style we know him in from Amenra. But the outburst is only short, and by 8:45 the guitar is back to a more ethereal type of play, at 9:30 the song’s back to its initial monotone and weird drone (albeit somewhat more diverse this time, sounding like the sounds of an underground turbine in combination with a storm raging outside mixed together, the two muffled through thick layers of concrete) in which occasional sound of something being dragged(?) occur. The fading out of that song is dragged ever so slightly into the following 3:28 instrumental “Wiech.:”, which knows a calmer opening (some 90 seconds) before Mathieu steps onto that distortion effect pedal. No transition into the 5:38 closing “Throne” (a song you can listen to at myspace.com/kingdomcomes), and also no letting go off the distortion pedal. Vocally, Colin brings his most sedate kind of singing for a short lament (fortified in its doomy effect by the fact that no guitar is played) about “his kingdom”, which is definitely míles away from what he does with Amenra. After a short return to calmness, the track ends with a passage with the instruments fading out in complete overdrive distortion. Overall, you could say that each of the tracks on the EP contains passages of both calm and heavy (though sludgy) melancholy…something which works wonderfully well! It’s dark, it’s doomy, it’s Sludge to the extreme…but with the necessary variation! The label recommends Kingdom to lovers of Isis, Tool, and of course Amenra…and I can only agree with the label’s assessment of the kind of people where Kingdom might find its fans! By the way, the EP (limited for on CD) also comes as 12-inch vinyl (limited amounts of coloured copies) with bonus poster! Yours truly will be a happy camper once he’s gotten his hands on a copy of those (even though I can already keep the CD-version, I much prefer old-fashioned vinyl…by the way, have you noticed how more and more people are returning to that non-digital music carrier?…how even the major labels – who’d sworn to abolish vinyl back in the ‘90s – are now releasing limited editions of their stuff on vinyl? I tell you: vinyl LIVES…and the artwork on it is always far more enjoyable than on those miniaturised CD album covers!!!). 98/100 Tony. |