After six full-length albums the Swedish extreme thrash/death-metal band,
The Crown, packed their bags and left the world of metal. This band was created somewhere in Sweden around 1990 under the name of
Crown Of Thorns, but the band was forced to change their band name because of a Christian-metal band. The reasons why the band left were because of the poor touring conditions and lack of income from playing, a very sad thing because this band was probably one of the top metal bands in the Swedish extreme-metal scene; so the band split-up in March 2004. They played a blend between death-metal, thrash-metal, a bit of punk and also had some influences from
Motorhead, but the primary genres are definitely death and thrash-metal. This mix created a furious, intensive and highly aggressive metal concoction: imagine
Carnal Forge forged with bands like
Dark Tranquillity or
Intombed and you will have a small idea of how this band sounded like. The line-up for this band has hardly changed during the time when the band was active, as the only member who became a former member was vocalist
Tomas Lindberg, who had also been a member of bands like
At The Gates,
Lock Up and
Nightrage and more.
This album is called
Deathrace King and was released in 2000, an album packed with lethal and deadly metal songs. There are eleven tracks on this album and all of them are forceful death/thrash attacks, but there are three tracks that have a ‘’slower and calmer’’ pace if you compare them to the other songs, these songs are
Dead Man’s Song,
Vengeance and
Killing Star. The rest of the songs are highly intensive and quite extreme, and there might be some repetitive warnings throughout the overall album material but the band does a good job to create some variety among the songs. The album also features some guest performances,
Tomas Lindberg appears in the track called
Devil Gate Ride and
Mika Luttinen appears as guest in the track called
Total Satan. As many other bands, this band does not have any reasonable lyrics, every lyrical theme is basically about anti-religious stuff and death/violent based themes.
As I mentioned before, the line-up has basically been the same during their active time as a band.
Deathrace King was performed by a crew of five people, and
Johan Lindstrand was the vocalist.
Johan used a quite powerful and harsh vocal style which was similar to
Mikael Stanne’s vocals (
Dark Tranquillity). The two guitarists,
Marko Tervonen and
Markus Sunesson, do a great job on this album. They combine ferocious and catchy rhythm sections alongside nearly blistering and typical Swedish melodic lead work, and there is a thick, rock solid wall of sound throughout the whole album which makes this a loud speaker blasting album.
Magnus Olsfelt was the bassist of this band, and unfortunately, you can’t hear the bass very well on this album. The bass is quite overshadowed by the two devastating guitars, and the overall bass mixing sound isn’t so grand either. There is a bass intro in one of the songs but the bass sounds so fuzzy and ‘’self-interfering’’, and t his makes the bass blend in together with the guitars, which is not a great thing in my opinion. Rhythm sections are basically the only thing that the bass is involved with so there are no standout performances or anything like that.
Janne Saarenpää was the drummer in this band. Nothings wrong with this drummer though, he blasts away with maniac fast and complicated drum patterns. Most drum patterns are very typical for the thrash-metal genres and of course death-metal, and are perhaps not catchy drumming but there is some double bass kicking here and there and other drum filling stuff that lowers the repetitive scale.
So what did I think about this album? I thought this was great, if not awesome. Many tracks got stuck in my head because of the fact that this is extreme music and has strong thrash elements featured throughout. One thing I liked about this album was the overall guitar work. You had these tight and incredible fast shredding riffs in songs like
Deathexplosion and then you had suddenly calmer riffs alongside melodic soloing in songs like
Dead Man’s Song. You can basically take any song from this album and you will find furious and energetic guitar work in every one of them. The solos were also very creative, as not everyone of the solos were chaotic and fast, there were also calmer and more melodic solos even in the most intensive songs which give them a more enjoyable feel. A second thing I liked was that the band played what they have claimed to be playing, this music was very intense and the album almost puked out large amounts of pure metal energy. You can just admire these kinds of musicians for their incredible stamina; I bet that there are not many persons who can just grab a guitar or what so ever and just rip off a song with this kind of intensity. Vocals were great, they suit the genre and music, and many aspects of this album and band were great but I did find some things that made me a bit sad. Yes I’m about to whine about the poor bass again, but I think that the guitars were a bit too loud and the bass had no chance to shine and when the bass did shine it didn’t sound so good either. One last thing before I end this, I thought that the band used a song pattern that felt a bit repetitive. All the songs had great musicianship but some songs felt a bit similar to each other. There was not much room for head banging too, but I guess that this is a matter of taste.
Time for some final words: this was not a bad album, it had some negative things but they were over powered by all the good things that I found. Awesome guitar work, thick and steady overall sound and very energetic and aggressive songs is the best way I can describe this album. If you like bands like
Carnal Forge and perhaps
Hypnosia or
any type of Swedish extreme-metal or death-metal music you should check out this album. But remember, this is highly extreme, aggressive and very fast music so I advice you to get at least a couple of songs first before you get the whole album.
My personal recommended tracks are following:
Deathexplosion Dead Man’s Song Total Satan Blitzkrieg Witchcraft. I think that this album needs some time to grow on you, but it grew on me faster than I imagined, so my overall rating for this album will be a:
4/5
