The great thing about Coronation of King Darkness is that it requires no predicates. From the perspective of a metal historian, sure, you might want to know that Black Crucifixion played a fairly seminal role in the development of Finnish black metal. But if you’re coming to this cold? Doesn’t matter. The music’s here to rock you, irrespective of how obsessively you’ve followed the crassly-woven strands backwards to trace the origins of these alien sounds we’ve pledged fealty to.
I’m not sure entirely why that’s the case with this album, either, but to make a potentially inapposite comparison, let’s think about Ulver. Whatever your opinion of such latter-day Ulver albums as Themes from William Blake’s Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Perdition City, and Blood Inside, I tend to think that they need to be listened to through the lens of black metal. Knowing that Ulver came from Bergtatt and Nattens Madrigal unlocks something about those later albums for me. I’m not sure that it’s necessary in the same way to know that Black Crucifixion came from The Fallen One of Flames before getting to Coronation of King Darkness.
Which, if anything, is just an argument for the striking alchemy at play on this triumphantly menacing album.
To dispense with the speculation: Coronation of King Darkness is a shimmering album, stuffed to every last seam and corner with muscular, modern, widescreen black metal that exults in arena-sized riffs. The album paces and stalks a giant auditorium stage, preening and scorning in equal measure. The bottom line? These Finnish OGs have emerged through a number of metamorphoses, and now display the sort of methodically grandiose black/rock sheen shared by latter-day Celtic Frost, Satyricon (Volcano and forward), and Valborg. (And, although it’s not entirely the same type of creature, this new Black Crucifixion easily bests the latest offering from Vreid.) Because the human mind yet claws desperately to fit things into associational networks, this particular listener also hears echoes of other bands making black metal on a continental scale such as Rotting Christ and Secrets of the Moon, and possibly even the faintest shadow of Ved Buens Ende in the occasional tremulous groan.
Where Black Crucifixion might have a leg up on these none-too-shoddy luminaries is in Coronation of King Darkness’s progressive tendencies. At least partially responsible for this is the presence of famed Finnish prog guitarist Pekka Rechardt, whose tasteful and intricate soloing classes up nearly every song. Despite the fact that these songs clearly target massive arenas rammed full with souls and bodies held in grateful thrall, they don’t content themselves with finding one massive, thudding groove and riding it into the dirt. Instead, these songs are more mercurial things – see especially the many moods and shifting sections of “What the Night Birds Sang,” and the nimbly changing tempos of album closer “Thieves.”
But say I need to break it down for you. Say you don’t know the band, don’t care, and couldn’t give a shit about telling apart Demilich from Archgoat from Beherit. Why should you spend your hard-earned time and money on Black Crucifixion? Well, here’s the simple answer (and really, the only answer that ought to matter): the riffs. There’s lots of ‘em, and they’re righteous. If you need pointers, why not try the hugely swaggering descending riff about 2:45 into “Heroes End Up on Gallows”? That riff alone would seal the song’s worth, but the fact that the band rides back into that original riff with a wonderfully contemplative half-gallop right at the end of the song is a demonstration of truly masterful songwriting.
Highlights are not scarce as Coronation of King Darkness twists and churns its way deeper into your most guarded reservoirs. The opening title track is a fierce yet tightly-constructed screed that aims to dethrone Satyricon’s “Fuel for Hatred” with its narrative economy and utterly irresistible stomp. “Lodestar” is supported by some wickedly wrought bass work, particularly in its last third, while a supreme “rocket your imaginary headstock high above your head and poke the cosmos in the eye” guitar solo is exactly the release a body craves after the tautness of a relentlessly tension-ratcheting section. The vocal performance of Timo “Forn” Iivari is, well, perhaps the crown on the album’s titular monarch: his voice is powerful, rough, and snarling as if through gnashed and gritted teeth, and yet still full of personality and deeply-emoted enunciation.
I keep coming back to the fact that this is palpably arena-ready black metal. Genre purists might scoff at such a notion, but I intend no condescension, particularly because, even more so than some of the like-minded bands previously mentioned, Black Crucifixion’s music never comes across as having been dumbed-down to achieve wider acceptance. Instead, these songs sound like they’ve been forged and hammered and sharpened to their most essential point; each one exudes an internal logic that prevents it from having been any other way.
If this album requires no predicates, then it also does not freight the listener with all the obligations of history; of “this did that here, but not there, and only after those”; of mediating lived experience through dusty words and lattices of timelines and familial trees. This music is simply present. It builds a world that you can either dwell in for a time, or not. It greets – and possibly even invites – bleakness with a grin.
