The Crown - Doomsday King

All hail the reverse gallop! The Crown’s Doomsday King (Century Media, 2010) is chock-full of it. At least six of the album’s 10 songs feature the reverse gallop. For those not familiar with the reverse gallop, it is, as its name implies, the inversion of the gallop.

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A gallop riff looks like this…

…and sounds like this.

Metallica – “Motorbreath” (gallop riff)
(First three beats of each bar)
[audio: METALLICA_MOTORBREATH(RIFF).mp3]

. . .

A reverse gallop riff looks like this…

…and sounds like this.

Behemoth – “Conquer All” (reverse gallop riff)
(Reverse gallops on low strings)
[audio: BEHEMOTH_CONQUERALL(RIFF).mp3]

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In short, the gallop goes “dun-dugga, dun-dugga”, while the reverse gallop goes “dugga-dun, dugga-dun”. Thanks to its “dugga”, the gallop has forward momentum. One “dun-dugga” leads to another. In contrast, the reverse gallop is a gesture of stopping. It wants to rest on its “dun”. So a series of reverse gallops is bumpy, due to all the starting and stopping. Run through high gain distortion, it becomes downright violent.

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“Angel of Death 1839”

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Doomsday King is a masterful lesson in violence. It rarely succumbs to the all-in dynamic of the blastbeat. Instead, it pushes and pulls. The non-reverse galloping songs gallop, and even within phrases the guitarists alternate galloping and reverse galloping. They leave precise holes between notes, like malevolent Morse code. Reverse gallops are like bursts of machine gun fire; the hulking production here makes them feel like divots torn from the earth and flung at the listener – high speed dirt, so to speak.

After a six-year break, The Crown are back doing what they were doing before: kicking ass. “Death/thrash” has become synonymous with “boring”, but The Crown did it right in the early ’00s, as did The Haunted. They kept the energy on both sides of the slash and didn’t take themselves too seriously. Sometimes they had a swagger that was almost rock ‘n’ roll – “death ‘n’ roll” before that became a self-conscious modus operandi. It’s one thing to try to kick ass, and other to just do it. (Yoda might say such a thing if he were in Army of Darkness.) The Crown did it before, and they have done it again.

Two ingredients are new; one is interesting. Vocalist Jonas Stålhammar is a midpoint between his predecessors Johan Lindstrand (low end) and Tomas Lindberg (high end). He’s suitably scathing, but he’s really just a placeholder: “insert melodic death metal rasp here”. For better or for worse, this facelessness does not bother most metalheads – and it doesn’t bother me here.

That’s because there’s so much other stuff going on. When not galloping and reverse galloping, the guitars take off on surprisingly intricate flights of melody. (They’re surprising because, unlike technical death metal, the focus here is not on intricacy.) The Crown have had this quality to varying degrees, but now it feels consistent and sure-handed. These songs both bludgeon and tickle the ear. “Angel of Death 1839”, perhaps winking at its name, gleefully modulates Slayer fragments up and down. “Soul Slasher” does likewise with a theme redolent of Bernard Herrmann’s Suite for Psycho.

Not only do these songs have individual identities – perish the thought in this age of “extreme metal” – they actually mean something. They address blasphemy, war, more blasphemy, and even a meditation on the nature of the soul (“From the Ashes I Shall Return”). But, of course, it’s set to thundering reverse gallops. On leather steeds the horsemen ride – backwards; they have come to take your life.

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“Soul Slasher”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MR2pghFpvE0

. . .

Bernard Herrmann – “Psycho Suite”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQRfTvayqk0

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BUY DOOMSDAY KING

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