The Wounded Kings – In the Chapel of the Black Hand

Share this on Facebook | Share this on Twitter

So here we go. Another review. Once more I have to put on my Indifference Cap and try to find something creative and interesting to say about an album I feel about the same emotional strength for as I do for a random Bolivian mailman. Which is to say, not much at all.

THE WOUNDED KINGS are about as straight up Doom Metal as you can get without going straight to BLACK SABBATH and their initial release. And to be quite blunt, that may be the only album that does the genre well.

See, here is the problem. Other subgenres tend to assault you with a wall of sound and a non-stop barrage of riffage and shouting. Doom Metal takes the opposite route to boredom and apathy by sitting on every chord for six minutes straight, drawling the vocals out to oblivion, and playing what could be a four minute song in thirteen. I can’t pretend to give a shit about this kind of thing. Listening to this album I became so bored that I was actually more inclined to watch the moth that got inside and observe it fly in and around a lampshade. I wish I was kidding.

This music does certainly have a good niche, though. It would be great to play at a funeral home, or at the very least, an old folks home. Because it does have the slow, haunting, ominous feelings of impending doom and gloom. It works – but only as background music while you saunter about the cemetery or slowly smother an elderly, bedridden gentlemen with a pillow.

I don’t hate it by any stretch of the imagination. But it simply does not have the necessary components to be the sole occupier of my attention. It’s too slow, it doesn’t really go anywhere, and it’s about as exciting as reading a pamphlet on late-term abortion.

To summarize, only play this album if you’re wandering through an abandoned prison from the 1930’s, or are slowly ascending a very long and very dimly lit staircase.