Fit For A King “Lonely God”
From the first blast beat to the final piece of orchestration, what begins here also ends. Lonely God is the new album from Texans Fit For A King and its dark, evocative and stands alone from their previous work.
It’s starts with Begin The Sacrifice and culminates with Witness The End and the tracks in between take you on the journey of striving for power and glory with being lonely once achieving it.
Written during the backdrop of the US Presidential elections, the blacker moods, the more aggressive tones and extraordinary emotional diversity of vocals land the pervading feeling we all have watching the US right now.
Begin The Sacrifice – one of the video trilogy – bounces and has a wicked breakdown while The Temple broods about ‘feeling the pressure’ while crushing your skull in demonic riffs.
The production duties of Dan Braunstein, arming the band with the tools to let loose, shows up in places like Extinction, which feels like a cathartic punching bag of anger and distortion, and No Tomorrow which rises like Godzilla destroying a city. ‘Destruction leads to a narcissistic power trip’ screams vocalist Ryan Kirby.
I am happy to go on record and state that if Monolith was recorded by an Australian metalcore band, that as a country we would stop to a standstill to salute them. It’s that epic.
Talking of epic, the title track is drum rolling heavy before the ballad after all the chaos in Between Us gives a breather as Kirby melancholy sings about ‘drifting into nothing’.
As the final timebomb ticks on the apocalyptic landscape the band have created with this album, we get Blue Venom and Technium, songs of blast beats, distortion and the guttural of Kirby unleashed before a sense of hope with Shelter, a beautiful uplifting ballad about losing your heart in a hurricane, which after the fury, comforts like a warm blanket on a cold night.
Witness The End, the recent single featuring Chris Motionless of Motionless In White, shows that the beautiful reflection of Shelter was faint. The world where being a Lonely God ends with sweeping orchestration, hammer pounding riffs and a grandiosity befitting a character that proved the adage of ‘either dying a hero or live long enough to become a villain’ is true.
This is a meaty album, with each listen more snippets appear, like side quests to keep you engaged. It works sonically, it’s stunning, it works conceptually as a story we’ve all experienced and can see, however best of all, it is a Fit For A King album that truly shows the best of them. An album for a king or a God.
Album Review By Iain McCallum
LONELY GOD – OUT AUGUST 1, Pre-Order/ Pre-Save HERE…
