Review: King’s Hammer – To Speak in Tongues
It’s about time the Christian metal scene came around to the fact that old-school death metal – brutal, melodic, whatever – is a wonderful thing. Though the so-called New Wave of Old School Death Metal movement has been around for awhile now, it’s been really thin pickings on this side of the scene for Christian death metal bands consuming and regurgitating their own ghoulish takes on the classics of old. The mainstream metal world (relatively speaking, obviously) has their leading lights like Blood Incantation and Tomb Mold, along with their cult icons like Fetid and Krypts. But the Christian metal scene has up until now been pretty quiet, outside of those lone torchbearers in Broken Flesh. Not so anymore. Bands like Burial Extraction, Come to Pass, Mangled Carpenter, Divine Incision, In-Conquered and others are holding the old-school torch high, and King’s Hammer is just the latest to join the fray.
You might have already seen some write-ups on King’s Hammer right here on Heaven’s Metal, so I won’t dig too much into the backstory. Suffice it to say that King’s Hammer is a solo project of multi-instrumentalist Chuck Weatherman (also of Shovelhead A.D.) interested in nothing but crafting high-quality death metal.
From the beginning, King’s Hammer dives right in with the industrial pounding of “The War in Heaven.” “Vehement Zeal” is the one every one knows by now, a massive send-up to the 90’s classics that channels everything from Obituary and Asphyx, especially in its death/doom portions. But no, this is 2025; King’s Hammer couldn’t care less, and I love it. You can hear almost everything from the crunchiness of Gatecreeper, the brutality of Come to Pass, and even the precision guitar jackhammering of early Fear Factory. The entire EP carries on in the grand tradition of the greats without ever falling into being derivative. With bands like this, it’s a fine line to walk between obvious influence and reverence towards a certain sound and style, and simply being a rip-off band. Thankfully, King’s Hammer manages to avoid that; indeed, I really get the sense that Chuck loves classic death metal and is simply doing his own thing with it while remaining firmly within its stylistic bounds. In short, it works, and it rocks.
Lyrically, it’s pretty much as straightforward as it gets when it comes to Christian death metal – demons being torn apart, spiritual struggle, you get the picture. But King’s Hammer focuses in especially on the kind of crusade-focused lyrics one would normally associate with bands like Dawnbreaker. Without getting too much into it, I’m not a huge fan of this kind of thing, but I get it. It works with the music, it works with the aggression. Fair enough.
Other than that, for guys like me enamoured with the classic sounds of 80’s and 90’s death metal, along with the new OSDM movement as a whole, it’s great to see some new artists and bands coming out with quality material like this that doesn’t go the “core” route of endless breakdowns. I’m hoping that with King’s Hammer and others like them, we’ll see a flourishing of this old-school sound and a return to what made death metal so exciting and dangerous in the first place. Fine stuff.
For Fans Of: Mangled Carpenter, Asphyx, Gatecreeper, Skeletal Remains, Bolt Thrower, Come to Pass, Mortification (early)
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