ALBUM REVIEW: A Deeper Shade of Sorrow – Rotting Kingdom
Lexington, Kentucky’s ROTTING KINGDOM are one of the most promising death-doom acts to come out of the underground in years. Since the release of their first, self-titled EP back in 2017, the band have developed a small but respectable cult status that’s centred around their impressive and varied sound. Their debut album, A Deeper Shade of Sorrow, is a great death-doom record that brings in a lot of different influences, making for an imaginative and eclectic mix of music that builds on the core sound of the genre and expands it, making for an interesting album.
Sculpted Into Life By The Hand of Death is an ethereal and haunting way to start the album, with light, hazy lead guitars and solid, robust rhythms creating a great feel out of the gate. It’s a slow burning track that incorporates softer guitar tones. It’s an impressive, though somewhat plodding, opening gambit that sets the tone for the rest of the album very well. Barren Harvest is a far more melody driven piece of music, with some excellent leads and hair raising harmonies that make for a livelier guitar sound. The slickness of the guitars is counterpointed by those monstrous vocals, which again carve through the mix and add plenty of weight to the music without completely overpowering the other elements of the song. There’s some slight experimentation with distortion which keeps this song interesting throughout, and lots of decent riffs which ultimately carry the song and make it all the more memorable.
Decrepit Elegance is a brief interlude that brings a little ambience into the mix, something that actually works quite well on this album. With minimalist percussion and a good piano motif, this brief break from the rest of the music does a decent job of breaking up the album whilst further diversifying the sound. Absolute Ruin, when compared with the first two songs on the record, is a much more energetic and feral piece of music that really grabs the listeners attention the second it begins. The guitars and vocals match up much better, with crushing, groove laden hooks and frenetic drumming providing a fantastic backdrop to those sludgy, demonic roars. It’s a shame that this song is so short, because it works incredibly well and reinvigorates the album, standing as not only one of the records heaviest offerings, but also one of its best.
The Antechambers of Eternity carries some of that intensity and venom forward, blending it with the more sprawling and expansive sound that defined the albums first half. With muscular rhythms and a much more savage sound, this track corrects all of the errors that the previous, lengthier tracks possessed; the guitars are noticeably meatier and dense, the vocals complement rather than overpower the music, and there’s just the right amount of variety in the distortion to give this song an intriguing, borderline psychedelic feel that only adds to this songs many charms. The guitars, likewise, are far more adventurous, which aids this track no end, making this a great climactic moment for the albums. A Deeper Shade of Sorrow, much like the first two tracks, uses cleaner tones and a crisper sound, but this time around it actually works fairly well, with the guitars and drums building a monolithic, epic sound that is built around huge rhythmic sections and majestic leads, with the vocals lending a sparse, but mammoth, depth to the sound. This is an incredibly powerful way to bring the album to a close, rectifying the mistakes made with the albums opening numbers perfectly.
Despite a shaky start, A Deeper Shade of Sorrow is impressive. ROTTING KINGDOM are clearly experimenting with the scope of their sound, with this testing of the musical waters often paying off and making for some incredibly engaging and memorable death doom. An impressive and imaginative debut album that lays down some fairly solid foundations on which to build their future albums, it’s clear that ROTTING KINGDOM have the chops to push themselves to the forefront of the death doom genre.
Rating: 7/10
A Deeper Shade of Sorrow is out now via Godz Ov War Productions.
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