review: Void King

Void King

Barren Dominion

Off The Record

13 September 2019

This is only the second album by Void King, a band that began around 2014/2015, says Metal Archives and Facebook. When you hear the music it does not seem like a second album, though. Maybe it is the maturity of the music. The vocals seem exceptionally well done. Let’s begin there. The vocalist, according to Metal Archives, sang on an album in 2009 with a previous band. Metal Archives then shows that the vocalist possibly has been in bands since at least 2003. Therefore, Void King is relatively new, but the musicians have been laboring around the block for years. That explains a lot. For one thing, Void Kong’s vocalist Jason Kindred appears to be 46 years young, and has the voice of someone with lots of experience with the craft.

This Indiana, U.S. band offers one particular characteristic that is special, and some others that should win over the devoted, can’t-get-enough doom fans. The first thing that is for the doom fans is the slow, thick fuzzed out guitar sound. They have riffs, but oftentimes it sounds like a slow motion pulsating fuzzed out effect that keeps echoing. It sounds like they want to trap people in a hall of mirrors that leads to an echo chamber of fuzzed out guitars. It’s a very nice sound, actually. The second thing is that the overall songs are pretty good. In other words, the band has good tunes. The third thing is that the production should be up to the standards of the genre that people expect.

Doom fans will notice that the singing is rather peculiar to the band. It is a big-belly type of gritty and bluesy crooning that is not one of the usual vocal styles of doom. Different people will hear different things. Some people say that it sounds like Tool’s vocals, but Tool sounds like a dude whining, like he’s crying in every song and it’s just an annoying voice, but Void King doesn’t sound like crying. It’s more like BB King has joined a doom band (which is not that difficult to imagine because Void King does play the doom blues in a real way). Another possibility is to imagine old Alice in Chains vocals hooking up with doom. The band apparently loves Clutch, so there may be a bit of that style of singing here, too. Void King does not sound like any of those bands, of course, but the point is that the singing does sound bluesy and croony. It’s not the typical doom growling and screaming, and the singing might win over people who don’t care for doom in general. voidking.bandcamp.com/album/barren-dominion

Void King - A Lucid Omega

voidking.bandcamp.com/album/barren-dominion