By this point, most are familiar with The Crown’s history and legacy. This is a band that hit an absolute bottom-of-the-ninth, game-seven-of-The-World-Series home run in 2000’s Deathrace King, a blistering fireball of rollicking death/thrash that was fun, knew it was fun, and knew it wanted to be fun. Add in a few more very strong albums, chief among them Crowned in Terror, and a bunch of decently-enjoyable-but-generally-unnecessary slabs, both under their current moniker and original label Crown of Thorns, and you’ve got their career in a nutshell.
All of this is an easy way of saying that no one is exactly chomping at the bit to get a new album from these Swedes, at least not without some amount of naïveté about the expected quality. Every album after Deathrace King, even the good ones, brought with it a nugget of truth that this band may have just gotten lucky on their classic; expecting Deathrace King II is a fool’s hope.
Death Is Not Dead, the band’s tenth album (if you’re counting Crown of Thorns) simply reinforces this truth. It’s another decently-enjoyable-but-generally-unnecessary slab, and at times is just downright odd in its stylistic choices—even if the few variations are some of the album’s bright spots.
These deviations from The Crown’s mean are interesting because they reveal a band that wants to possibly explore a little, but is almost completely unsure how to do so. For example, they cover Paradise Lost‘s “Eternal,” and pretty admirably—it might be the album’s top track. The Corrosion of Conformity-esque second half of “Ride to Ruins” and melodic instrumental “Meduseld” (even The Crown references Tolkien) likewise shift from the band’s usual sound, and are some of the more interesting moments as a result.
So when the vast majority of the album is still The Crown’s signature melodeath/thrash’n’roll or whatever, it does not bode well when it is the few surprises that stand out the most. Not that the rest of the album is weak – several tracks are quality and the blast-ridden “Herd of Swine” is an absolute monster – but there is little that can compete with the band’s Deathrace / Terror glory days. Worse yet, it occasionally sounds stiff, and anyone even mildly familiar with this band knows that the fun factor is a crucial ingredient in their sound.
More than anything, Death Is Not Dead begs the question: What exactly is The Crown up to? Parts of this feel uninspired, parts are absolute raging, and other parts show a desire to expand. The clearest and simplest conclusion one could draw is that it is just an inconsistent album from a veteran band. At least it’s mildly interesting, which is probably more than anyone expected from them at this stage in the game.
