Day: May 13, 2016

Four long litanies based on an exhausting doom sludge, but varied enough to be appreciated, is what Deathkings offer in their second full length, All That Is Beautiful. It’s hard to understand what could be, then, beautiful and comforting in the world foreshadowed by the Californian band with a title presumably sarcastic: a voice shouts his anger that subsides at times, when the sound, mostly granitic, seems to take a break and then resume with its grinding riffs. Maybe just these passages are the least incisive point of the work, waning an intensity that instead emerges in an overbearing way when Deathkings decide to open the engines to the maximum. It’s also true, on the other hand, that it would be unthinkable and maybe counterproductive to keep this same pace for more than an hour, so, wanting to express themselves on minutes of similar features, the inclusion of more experimental and less direct passages becomes almost a necessity. It must also be said that the 18 minutes of the opener Sol Invictus are basically the ones that suffer the most from this sort of dichotomy, while already in the following The Storm the compositional skills of Deathkings emerge in a more focused form, giving life to a harsh song with a melancholic aftertaste. More direct and angry is The Road To Awe, while the almost 20 minutes of Dakhma are a further test of endurance from which the four Los Angeles guys come out well, without giving in to any winks to lead the long song, even if, somehow, we return to the patterns proposed at the beginning of the work. All That Is Beautiful is undoubtedly a good album, although it seems difficult that it can conquer someone who is not entirely addentro to the genre, remaining intended, therefore, to listeners willing to be eroded in a slow but relentless way.

2016 – Independent