Kingcrow
Insider
4.8
A basement, a boombox, some crappy hard rock and a typically horrible singer. All hail Kingcrow.
I scoured the press release and mentioned nothing about this being an advanced, pre-recording demo of the upcoming album, so I have to assume they wanted to sound like shit. Mission accomplished. That anyone could pretend this is a record worthy of someone's money and attention speaks volumes about the ease with which people can get things released these days. But I have honestly heard better recorded soundcheck board mixes. This is what rock sounds like from the bathroom.
I guess this is a concept album - what a novel idea for a power rock band - because there are delightfully bad spoken word bits between the songs...and they are recorded far, FAR better than the band. To get any kind of sound quality out of this thing I had to turn up my system, and when the spoken word parts popped up they nearly blew my woofers. Anyway, the story is very dramatic. You can tell because the acting is so bad. Acting that bad happens only in very dramatic art or porn. And I am praying to whatever powers may have swayed in this universe that it's not porn.
The shame of it, I guess, is that the underlying musical ideas are not any worse than other power rock music. In fact, consider how badly it is recorded, the band is tight and confident. They lay some interesting rhythmic constructions down. Of course the guitarist shines. Power rock guitarists all shine. I think they are all the same person.
Also of course the singer is a detriment, but not a falsetto one, which makes him a little easier to take. The words he has to sing are funny, and I am relatively certain they aren't meant to be serious, but that is rock music for you.
Bottom line: I am almost stunned that a band that cares enough to become this tight and write songs that could be interesting under different circumstances - at least to power rock fans - would release an album that sounds this amateurish. The one thing that can be said for power rock is that it's about the best produced format on the planet. Sometimes it's the only thing that makes it listenable for me. Kingcrow, for whatever reason, has taken the lonelier path of crap production AND worn out themes. So don't buy this.
