Hammer King
King Is Rising
(Cruz Del Sur)
These German power metal kings and hammers are back with more hammering and kinging, as well as more songs about hammering and kinging. You pretty much get the idea, but this time it doesn’t come off quite as strong and memorable to me as the group’s debut album, Kingdom Of The Hammer King (2015). Also, we have to consider that releasing a new album so quickly might have been a bit of a rash decision on their part. To me, the record just seems a bit copy and paste and doesn’t really have the spirit or the might that some of the debut’s tracks held for me. I had heard quite a bit of power metal discs around that time, but there was just something about the first Hammer King record that really struck me. Several of the tracks I caught myself playing quite a few times in a row, because they were just so incredibly memorable. So the first thing I did here was to pay attention to the choruses. Can lightning really strike twice, with Titan Fox V knocking it out of the park on every cut? Well, unfortunately not. The title track comes off pretty good with some impressive vocal aesthetics, but there are a lot of songs here that feel very Hammerfall, rather than Hammer King and that’s going to be a bit of a detriment to what I felt was quite a unique act. In terms of riffing, “Last Hellriders” sounded like a Hammerfall or even a Helloween track and it was also surprisingly short (less than three minutes) with “For God and The King” just sort of being there. “Warrior’s Reign” actually manages to hit hard in all of it’s Manowar-influenced glory, but “Kingbrother” is the one that really hit home for me. If there was one catchy cut here, it’s this one. I will say that while listening to this on my MP3 player for the first time, I though Fox was singing “King Robert” instead of “Kingbrother” and it had me imagining a scene where some heavy-set fellow dressed all in green with a large bushy beard and a golden crown upon his head was slaughtering armies with a sword. Even so, this is still a great track and an example of what this band is capable of when all cylinders are firing. As an honorable mention, I’d say that the silliness of “The Hammer Is The King” definitely captures the spirit of what I remember as well; though it is just not as good as it was the first time around. Additionally, something can certainly be said about the album’s grandiose closer “Eternal Tower Of Woe” which actually adds a little bit of taste to the formula and strips the band of their silliness. Furthermore, I can really say that much of King Is Rising seems to focus on more textured and diverse tracks, which might not make it as catchy as the prior and feels like a bit of a risk… but it is musically a step forward.
One of the interesting things about Hammer King is the fact that guitarist Gino Wilde and drummer Dolph Macallan both act as a sort of background choir on many of these songs, which add a great degree of depth to the performance. This allows them to soar far above similar power metal acts that don’t utilize the same level of vocal theatrics, allowing them to retain at least some semblance of the originality that I heard on the previous record. Greater effort has been placed on composition and guitar solos, which I am certainly not upset with, but there just aren’t enough heavy hitters here for me to consider any higher of a rating for the release. This is especially kept in mind when CD-only bonus track “Our Fathers’ Fathers” is actually far from any kind of B-Side performance that you might find at the end of an album. Instead, this is one of the disc’s greatest tracks, which is not only showcased in the chorus, but in the instrumentation and impressive solo cut. There are about seven rather strong and manageable pieces here (give or take a few) which certainly garners a listen, but I just don’t think that these gentlemen are ever going to be able to rise above that debut for me. I will say that if you really loved the debut as much as I did, definitely give yourself some time to soak some of these in as they aren’t going to just reach out and bite you on the nose in the same way as that one did. Even so, you can’t fault the band for attempting to break free of their hammer and king shtick and it’s nice to see them exploring other textures within their music. Maybe it wasn’t wise to put this one out quite so soon – it still needed some work and several of these songs probably won’t even make the set list; but that doesn’t mean that the effort was a wash, either. I feel that this is just a logical step in the band’s evolution and perhaps we’ll hear greater things in the future.
