Review Summary: No, hell isn't here. Noise Is Here. This album is too hard to enjoy because it is too intense, repetitive and unpolished.
The Crown is a death/thrash metal band from Sweden. They became one of Sweden’s finest extreme metal bands since they had a solid sound and they executed their music with accuracy and precision. The band had to change their name once, after two releases the band had to change their name into
The Crown instead of
Crown Of Thorns. The reason why was because that there was already a band that was named
Crown Of Thorns. That band got angry and
Crown Of Thorns became
The Crown. The band released several albums until the band decided to put the band to an end. Two reasons were because of their economics due to poor income from all the tours. The second factor was probably the lack of improvement and creativity (musically). Their music was a very ferocious mix of death-metal and intense thrash-metal. There were still some small occasions when the band actually used some melody and clean vocals, but most of the time the music was non-stop extreme death/thrash.
ALBUM: HELL IS HERE, 1999
Strengths –
Hell Is Here is probably not their greatest album but there are some things here that should draw attention. For those who love high-speed extreme metal will probably like this album. The music in this album is very intense and it is played with dead-on precision, there is a lack of overall variety though. Same goes for the vocals,
Johan Lindstrand delivers a very powerful vocal performance in this album, he actually does that in every single album he sings in basically. His vocals are loud and half-chocked death roars and/or screams, the vocals really add lots of texture to the extreme music. This album also has some melody and that does not occur often in
The Crown’s music. The overall material isn’t melodic but some riffs and solos have a touch of melody that reduces the repetitiveness a little bit. You will even experience some electro acoustics and some ordinary acoustics in this album, the bad thing is that there are too few of those moments.
Weaknesses – Even if the members of this band are professionals the album still has more flaws than good stuff. The biggest flaw is the drumming, I’m not saying that the drumming sounds bad but
Janne Saarenpaa makes the album so repetitive. Almost every track has the same drum patterns, which will say blast-beats and other types of hyper-speeded drum patterns. Only a couple of songs have some variety in the drum parts. Another bad thing is that the drums and the vocals are dominating the material; usually the guitars are the main dish but not here. While the bass is nearly non-existent the guitars are actually lower than the drums, but thankfully there are some tracks that has strong guitars and the drums are put aside. Alongside the drums we also have the vocals; the only bad thing about the vocals is that there is a huge lack of variety.
Johan uses only his loud screams and a few ‘’clean’’ screams, it also sounds like he has some kind of fluid or something in his mouth while he is singing. At least I get a strange feeling in my throat when I listen to this album.
If you are planning to get into
The Crown’s music then I strongly recommend that you should start with another album. If you want aggressive thrash then you should try
Deathrace King, if you want more death-like thrash then you should try
Crowned In Terror. And if you are looking for some more technical but still highly aggressive then you should try
Possessed 13. This album is not a good start for newcomers, but if you are a fan of this band then this album shouldn’t be a problem. Repetitiveness, too much intensity, and overall lack of variation/innovation are the factors that drag this album towards to bottom.
Recommended Tracks
-- Mysterion (
An intense, half-melodic and catchy song, best track if you ask me.)
-- Death By My Side (
A slow, half-depressive but heavy track.)
This album will be given an uncertain 2.5/5.
