King 810 - La Petite Mort or a Conversation With God (Album Review)
Thursday, 22 September 2016
Written by Alec Chillingworth
La Petite Mort: The Little Death. In the language of love, we’re talking the throes of an orgasm. There is nothing about King 810’s second LP that would induce that blissful state, unless you’re into some really weird shit. Which is fine.
This is a horrible album. Not horrible like Lamb of God or Deicide or Morbid Angel, but actually horrible. This isn’t just a metal record, nor is it an exercise in posturing as King 810’s detractors would have you believe. ‘La Petite Mort’, even more than its predecessor, ‘Memoirs of a Murderer’, is a unique proposition in heavy music.
“I’m back home, motherfucker, give me my guns and my throne,” snarls vocalist David Gunn on Heavy Lies The Crown before everything descends into chugging, devilishly dense territory. This isn’t the Slipknot/Korn hybrid you were led to believe King 810 were, it’s a deathcore breakdown played by Swans.
Give My People Back has a riff that might once have belonged to the masked Iowans, and Vendettas has a certain “Jump the fuck up!” bounce to it, but for the most part, ‘La Petite Mort’ bypasses straight up metal.
This isn’t about melody. This isn’t about radio singles or first-week sales. This is four men continuing to create a musical counterpart to their hometown of Flint, Michigan. Gunn is an untrained Tom Waits or Nick Cave, with nearly eight minutes ticking by as his life consumes you on the almost post-rock La Petite Mort.
And that’s what you have to understand in order to appreciate ‘La Petite Mort’. Gunn is spilling his guts. You got behind Korn when they did it, so what’s the difference here? The lyrics are about gang violence and his friends dying and suicide attempts because that’s what happened.
There’s no rhyming couplets or metaphors for it – this is a continuation of Gunn’s confessional. The way his inflection perfectly conveys his rage, with little in the way of the hip hop cadence or flow that was hinted at on ‘Memoirs of a Murderer’, is terrifying. He’s here to tell the story. He doesn’t want you to sing along.
Musically, the band aren’t the most proficient unit. But they don’t need to be. King 810 possess a fluidity that allows Andrew Beal to sneak some bluesy noodling into Me & Maxine and for the orchestration of Black Swan to sweep the listener away without being hammy. Goon Sqwad’s Trick Trick injects the dramatic War Time with an extra dimension of aggression, the song culminating in a choir of children stating: “Violence took my everything.”
Even the saxophone on Life’s Not Enough slots in perfectly, stripping everything back to ride alongside Andrew Workman’s occasional cymbal tickling. And then there’s A Conversation with God, which rumbles with angelic, choral clarity before dropping into the end credits of a psychological thriller. And then you can breathe again. The punishment is over.
King 810 aren’t going to kick up the same fuss they did with ‘Memoirs of a Murderer’, because that audience has moved onto the next hot shit leaking from the music industry’s colon. But no matter. We have ‘La Petite Mort’. It’s gruelling, not instantaneous at all and it’s got nothing in the way of commercial appeal. Were this released by Neurosis, it’d be five star ratings across the board. You should listen to it anyway. Because it’s stunning.
NOTE FROM THE EDITOR
We don't run any advertising! Our editorial content is solely funded by lovely people like yourself using Stereoboard's listings when buying tickets for live events. To keep supporting us, next time you're looking for concert, festival, sport or theatre tickets, please search for "Stereoboard". It costs you nothing, you may find a better price than the usual outlets, and save yourself from waiting in an endless queue on Friday mornings as we list ALL available sellers!
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
