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It\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2019s Hammer is just the latest to join the fray. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
You might have already seen some write-ups on King\u2019s Hammer right here on Heaven\u2019s Metal<\/em>, so I won\u2019t dig too much into the backstory. Suffice it to say that King\u2019s Hammer is a solo project of multi-instrumentalist Chuck Weatherman (also of Shovelhead A.D.) interested in nothing but crafting high-quality death metal. <\/p>\n\n\n\n From the beginning, King\u2019s Hammer dives right in with the industrial pounding of \u201cThe War in Heaven.\u201d \u201cVehement Zeal\u201d is the one every one knows by now, a massive send-up to the 90\u2019s classics that channels everything from Obituary and Asphyx, especially in its death\/doom portions. But no, this is 2025; King\u2019s Hammer couldn\u2019t 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\u2019s 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\u2019s 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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Lyrically, it\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2019m 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Other than that, for guys like me enamoured with the classic sounds of 80\u2019s and 90\u2019s death metal, along with the new OSDM movement as a whole, it\u2019s great to see some new artists and bands coming out with quality material like this that doesn\u2019t go the \u201ccore\u201d route of endless breakdowns. I\u2019m hoping that with King\u2019s Hammer and others like them, we\u2019ll 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n