ALBUM REVIEW: Suicide King – KING 810
In our world of colourful, extroverted characters, few artists are more divisive than Michigan natives KING 810. With a penchant for guns and a notorious lyrical narrative of life on the streets of hometown Flint, there’s not much room for being on the fence with your opinions on the band, you either love them or passionately hate them. It’s not just the content that evokes such strong feelings in people though, the music itself, especially on 2016’s La Petite Mort Or A Conversation with God, is often as challenging as it is confrontational, and it’ll come as no surprise that new record Suicide King treads a similar creative path.
From the opening notes of Heartbeats, you know you’re in for an album quite unlike anything else you’ll hear this year. Off kilter vocals mesh together with cataclysmic, highly distorted instrumentation to form a barrage of noise that is as intense as it is unique. Almost every element you’ll hear on this record has been attempted before and has arguably been done to a higher standard, but it’s the amalgamation of all these individual puzzle pieces that is most impressive, each note and every instrument being carefully placed to rather ironically give the sense of something completely scattershot and spontaneous.
Say what you will about David Gunn‘s lyrics or vocal delivery, but there’s no doubting that he is a captivating figure; an almost sadistic ringleader orchestrating the barely-controlled chaos that swirls around him like a maelstrom of violence. There’s no stronger evidence of this than on Braveheart – a track that sounds like it’s about to become unglued at any given moment with riffs tearing at their chains and threatening to descend into a cacophony of white noise.
If you’ve already formed a negative opinion on KING 810 then this record is unlikely to change your mind, and tracks like the conspicuously titled Bang Guns do reinforce some of the more dubious aspects of the band, notably the obsession with firearms. Then again, it’s become clear at this stage that to take everything Gunn says literally is missing the point entirely. These songs are exaggerated manifestations of the band’s views and experiences, and while it would be fruitless to defend the themes being offered up here or indeed throughout their career to date, it would also be rather naive to take any of these words at face value.
The fact that KING 810 are so firmly entrenched as pantomime villains of the metal world however does serve to act as their downfall on this record. The tongue-in-cheek focus on guns, drug-dealing and general nonsensical violence starts to take precedence over the quality of the music, .45 being a prime example of this as misguided hip-hop beats provide a flimsy canvas over which Gunn spits like EMINEM at his absolute laziest. Following track What’s Gotten Into Me certainly provides more ideas than its immediate predecessor, but as with much of the record a good deal of the aural punches fail to convincingly hit the mark.
Let’s not kid ourselves or be close-minded here, when this record is good, it’s outstanding. There are simply just not enough moments to help this live up to the hype or justify the attention that the band consistently receive across the board. They already proved last time out that they have it in them to craft an album of powerful, fist-swinging anthems, yet this just feels like a bit of a backwards step both creatively and sonically.
There are some experimental moments littered throughout, just listen to the last minute of Black Rifle, but are these glimpses as dexterous or intriguing as some of the latter tracks on La Petite Mort? In short, no. Even on the ambitious and almost heartfelt Wade In The Water, where the pace drops dramatically and the band sound barely recognisable from the gang that they were at the start of the album, the song takes too long to fully get going, resulting in a rather flat pay-off that never hits the heights that it could have done.
Sing Me To Sleep does manage to inject a much-needed dose of creativity into the final stages of the record, blending styles in a much more coherent and captivating way and harking back to the most interesting moments of the band’s back catalogue. The line “I don’t wanna die but I don’t want to live like this” fittingly ends up being a pretty accurate summary of the situation that KING 810 currently find themselves in, as it feels as if their momentum has started to stall over recent years and is in need of something to kick-start them back on the road to being the arena-filling behemoth that they were billed as potentially being all those years ago.
As Suicide King draws to a close it’s once again clear that there’s something here that most bands just don’t have; personality. Whether you’re a fan of the personalities involved is a different matter, but if this combination of undeniably talented musicians can keep the quality going over the course of an entire record, they are unquestionably capable of giving us a classic album. They’ve missed the target by a greater margin here than they did in 2016, but if you think it’s safe to write them off as a novelty act that have now run their course, then you clearly haven’t been paying attention.
Rating: 6/10
Suicide King is due for release on January 25th via self-release.
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