MACHINE HEAD — Of Kingdom and Crown (review)

MACHINE HEAD — Of Kingdom and Crown album cover Album · 2022 · Groove Metal Buy this album from MMA partners
4.5/5 ·
Kev Rowland
One of the (dis)advantages of being around the scene for way too many years, is that my brain tends to fill up with musical garbage, and I can recall a debate taking place in the Kerrang offices over whether the latest Ted Nugent album was any good, and agreement being reached that if it did not have his name on the cover they would have probably rated it much higher. I was thinking that as I listened to the first song on this album, “Slaughter The Martyr”, as it is a stunning track showing that Robb Flynn is still full of new ideas all these years down the road, but I wonder what the critics will say? I was fortunate enough to see these guys play when they came to New Zealand to support Slipknot on the ‘All Hope Is Gone’ tour and was incredibly pleased as they had been on my bucket list for years. They were as brilliant as I expected them to be, but since then there have been quite a few changes, and while bassist Jared MacEachern has been there since 2013, both Waclaw “Vogg” Kieltyka (guitar) and Matt Alston (drums) have joined since the last album. Given the importance of both Phil Demmel and Dave McLain to their sound over the previous decades that is quite some hole to fill, so what to do?

In many ways Robb Flynn has looked back inside himself and poured everything into a rethink of the band so while we still have the rough core sound, Jared’s high clear vocals are being used in a way not dissimilar to the role ICS Vortex used to play in Dimmu Borgir, and they have allowed themselves to move away from the core into more commercial areas yet always with that strong link with the past. Given they were probably always going to get some critical backlash since the departure of key personnel, they went the whole hog and have released a concept album which is set in a futuristic wasteland where the sky is always crimson red. It tells the tale of two characters, both faced with incalculable trauma, whose stories become bloodily entwined as the story progresses.

I confess, the first time I played this my thoughts were “this is a great album, but it’s not Machine Head”, but the more I played this the more I thoroughly enjoyed it and instead I started thinking “isn’t it great that the band have expanded and don’t want to just play ‘Burn My Eyes’ for the rest of their career”. This album may not be quite what many people will expect when they see the name on the cover, but while this is certainly their most diverse album to date, it is also their best since ‘The Blackening’ and is well worth discovering.
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