Originally written by Dan Staige.
There are a couple of things that I feel I need to say about this new album from Hate Eternal….#1, I haven’t heard anything this pissed off in quite some time, and #2, the production does not fit the music very well at all…….. In this day & age it almost seems that a good double-kick drum sound is essential in order to get your point across as far as aggressive metal goes. While Derek Roddy’s drum attack is without a doubt absolutely ruthless and relentless to the core, I was expecting a bit more of a punchier sound on the kick drum. Conquering the Throne had really good kick sound, almost sounding overly triggered at some points, but the sound here on King of All Kings is just too flat for my liking. But if you can get past that, I’m sure you’ll agree when I say that this album is a pure blast of fury. However, I fail to find much uniqueness from song to song. Beats are very commonly timed the same, and there’s a lack of good quality hooks. “Born by Fire” has a decent riff at the end, but it’s just too bad that it was already used in a Morbid Angel song. As far as technicality, nothing here is going to make it difficult to follow along really, which obviously is not a horrible thing by any means, but it’s just something that I personally look for when judging an album. I really think that the album on a whole is very speed-driven and contains enormous amounts of rage, but there’s just not enough here to captivate my interest for very long, which could be a good thing when factoring in the overall shortness of this release……. So King of All Kings is basically one mood all the way through: Hate. I personally dislike the production, but to a lot of people that probably doesn’t make that big of a difference. I like Conquering the Throne quite a bit better, and even that disc doesn’t get into my player very often…..about as often as I get the craving for midget porn, which equates to about once every six months or so…….For Erik Rutan fans I’d say yeah, you will probably dig this more than I do. For Morbid Angel fans I’d say that you won’t find nearly the same amount of depth in this material as any other Morbid release including Rutan.
