The Wounded Kings, In the Chapel of the Black Hand: Call Upon Dionysus
Posted in Reviews on October 6th, 2011 by H.P. Taskmaster
It might be time to stop thinking of The Wounded Kings as traditional doom. On their third album since 2008, In the Chapel of the Black Hand (I Hate Records), the British outfit have all but completely grown past their earlier connections to the doom of yore – if there are any similarities between the thorough and encompassing atmospheres of these four tracks (really three and one well-placed interlude) and the likes of ‘80s and ‘90s doomers, it’s in the cultish atmospheres The Wounded Kings present, and that can be traced further back to ‘70s Hammer Horror and freak folk. Make no mistake, The Wounded Kings are doomed on In the Chapel of the Black Hand – perhaps even the most doomed they’ve yet been, which anyone who heard last year’s stellar The Shadow Over Atlantis or their An Introduction to the Black Arts split with Virginian volume mongers Cough will tell you is no easy feat – but the drive of the record is thinking forward rather than paying tribute, and that’s a big difference when it comes doom that’s played so excruciatingly slow. Part of any perceivable change in the band’s sound, however, has to be attributed to the fact that The Wounded Kings in 2011 is a completely different band than they were even a year ago.
Now a five-piece, guitarist Steve Mills has essentially reconstructed the band around himself, with vocalist Sharie Neyland taking over for Mills’ co-founder George Birch, and drummer Mike Heath, bassist Jim Wilumsen and second guitarist Alex Kearney coming aboard to round out the current lineup. It’s still Mills in charge of the writing, and his guitars were always layered anyway with Hammond and synth (which he also handles again here), but there are discernable musical differences between In the Chapel of the Black Hand and The Wounded Kings’ past incarnations and outings. Inarguably, Heath gives the best performance on drums the band has ever had on an album – and the best-sounding, as captured by Chris Fielding of the Welsh Foel Studios (Electric Wizard, Conan, Serpent Venom) – and Neyland’s vocals, while perhaps sharing some of Birch’s vibrato and echoing otherworldliness in their depictions of pagan and occult ceremonies and themes, are bound to be a key distinguishing factor for many listeners, if only for the gender-switch of the band’s frontperson. Mills remains consistent tonally, on these cuts, particularly with “Curse of Chains” from the Cough split, which had better production overall than the last record, but shows growth in his songwriting methodology. Centered around three longer tracks – “The Cult of Souls,” “Gates of Oblivion” (with parts subtitled “The Descent,” “Dominion” and “Arrival”) and the closing “In the Chapel of the Black Hand” – with the four-minute “Return of the Sorcerer” just before the closer, In the Chapel of the Black Hand feels more concise than its predecessor, even though it’s almost exactly the same length. The ambience of The Shadow Over Atlantis’ instrumentals, “Into the Ocean’s Abyss” and “Deathless Echo,” has been reworked and added to the songs themselves here, and In the Chapel of the Black Hand flows smoother for it, its doomed march that much more visceral.
Some bands you just know are going to be unrelenting, and that’s certainly the case with long-running New Jersey mega-doomers Evoken. Their last outing saw them reissue their first demo in the form of Shades of Night Descending on Displeased Records, and now they follow that with four new tracks on a split with Swedish outfit Beneath the Frozen Soil on the I Hate imprint that also released their excellent 2007 full-length, A Caress of the Void. Beneath the Frozen Soil were also last heard from in terms of new material in ’07, when they released a split with Long Island, NY, sludgers Negative Reaction. Maybe they just have something for the East Coast, but either way, the pairing with Evoken makes more sense sonically, as Beneath the Frozen Soil are closer to them in sound and overall feel. What that means as regards listening is that the split is consistent in terms of flow, and if you’ve ever heard anything from either of these two bands, you already know the extremely oppressive nature of their output.
”). If all of their albums weren’t over an hour long, I’d be tempted to call Evoken’s four-track contribution to the Beneath the Frozen Soil split full-length at over 42 minutes; in any case, they’re certainly not lacking in conveyance of aural hopelessness. Drummer/founder Vince Verkay makes the most of his nearly 20 years of experience in the band, easily taking on the task of grounding the 13-minute “The Pleistocene Epoch” – which would confound many – and knowing when to step back and give the guitars room, as on “Vestigial Fears.” Keyboardist Don Zaros provides some respite from the crushing sounds, but between the guitars (Chris Molinari makes three), Verkay’s morose pacing and the added thickness of Dave Wagner’s pace, Evoken are near-lethal in their miserable cohesion. They finish cold (of course) on “Vestigial Fears” and close their portion with “Into the Primal Shrine,” – their only cut under 10 minutes at 7:21 – which is instrumental but for a few non-verbal growls from Paradiso spread across the earlier moments.
I’m going to be honest with you: I really, really like this album. I’ve gone back to it time and again since hearing it early this year, and doing so has brought me nothing but satisfaction. The Wounded Kings are a bright spot on the UK‘s hope for the doomed future. I felt that way with 2008′s Embrace of the Narrow House, and I feel that way with their I Hate Records debut, The Shadow Over Atlantis.
Steve Mills and guitarist/bassist/vocalist George Birch inflict an atmosphere so dense that it affects your mood for the rest of the day. There’s plenty of doom out there that’s dreary, but The Wounded Kings go beyond the melancholic, plunging the depths of Lovecraftian terror and arising therefrom with a hellacious beauty in tow. “The Swirling Mist” and “The Sons of Belial” are more rituals than songs.
When they made their debut in 2008 with Embrace of the Narrow House (Eichenwald Industries), the then-duo of multi-instrumentalist Steve Mills and vocalist/guitarist George Birch inserted themselves into the ever-growing sphere of bands with a direct line to Black Sabbath‘s darkest moments we commonly know as traditional doom. Though subgenre designations are debatable (endlessly so), what comes across centrally in the material of the UK‘s The Wounded Kings is not the band paying homage in the form of imitation, but rather, striving to bring something new to the foundations on which they’re working.
Whenever I hear a record like the The Shadow over Atlantis, the jaw-dropping sophomore outing from UK doomers The Wounded Kings (and contrary to whatever hyperbole is yet to come, reason knows there are other albums that have provoked this reaction), I feel oppressed by it, like I’m drowning in it — and yes, that is a very good thing. The duo’s I Hate Records label debut crosses traditional lines with newer atmospheres, and maintains a punishingly, torturously slow approach that simply is the essence of doom. As the cover art harkens to the vinyl days of yore while keeping a mystical, occult vibe, so too does the music fall into line across the six tracks of the album.
