Welcome to the meandering musical insights of Aaron Joy (me!), formerly known as the Roman Midnight Music Blog. Here you'll find nearly 750 reviews of CDs & DVDs of rock & metal in all its variations, mainstream & indie, good & bad, U.S. & foreign. A new review every Monday.

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September 22, 2011

The Kalling ~ A World To Come (album review) ... Death march!


Style: death metal, heavy metal
Label: self-released
Year: 2011
Home: Texas

Members: Bryan 'B-Ray' Ray ~ guitars/vocals

Gerald 'G-Man' Barnett ~ drums

It might be the underground production quality that, unintentionally or not, pushes the vocals far out front or maybe it's the occasional backing vocals echoing out lines in a duet manner (i.e. "Savage Rain"), or the droning guitar lines in the background underneath the verses (i.e. "In The Darkness") but the result is something that sounds like death metal as if coming out of Aleister Crowley's ghostly & lonely Loch Ness mansion ... or at least music to foretell the future by. The debut from a pair of old music industry hounds, who combined resume includes playing with bands such as Slaughter, Lizzy Borden & the Marshall Tucker Band, a follow-up Evil Kalling You was already in the works before the ink had set on the A World To Come attests to the high creative energy of this union. A World To Come, as the title belays, is a concept album of apocalyptic ideas mixed with politics, terrorism, corruption & old fashioned good & evil. It's not fancy or flashy but is definitely hypnotic. It might be the low production but it's made the album better because of it & it'll become assuredly an addictive listen. The eight minute long stomp "Death March", double the length of any other song, haunts the album early on & brings the evil to ground zero, literally, with its moaning deathly repetition that ends as fast as any actual war ... that is it goes on till you feel sick & then that's when you feel it's power hit you. If you want ghastly metal that crawls instead of twists, turns & then fizzles with flash then the Kalling has put together something you should enjoy. The one bump in the road is the instrumental "2012". Not that there's anything wrong with riffing guitars using the always cool doppler effect but, like many instrumentals, its often weaker than the arrangements of the vocal songs & doesn't particularly add anything to the whole other than a break which this album is too short to need.

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