ALBUM REVIEW: Green King – Hidden Beyond Time


 

Helsinki-formed outfit Green King’s debut album, Hidden Beyond Time (The Sign) encourages you to Travel Back In Time, to the NWOBHM – in a good way. It’s all expertly done, all great fun, and, as a long-playing calling card, introduces a quality band that obviously have a grasp of several genres while strongly suggesting there is much more still to come.

 

Iron Maiden influences are apparent on ‘Gates Of Annihilation’ – melody and swagger, so trad, so metal. Similarly, ‘Godkiller’ gallops forward, while all we can do is hold on to the reins and career back to 1982-ish. Maiden influences reign again, with a strong lead geetar break.

If you’re into your Euro metal, be it Sweden’s classy Opeth or nutters Watain, Norway’s Satanic lot Gorgoroth and/or Poland’s ever mighty Behemoth, not to mention Noctem, from Valencia, Spain, and many others, Finnish feast Hidden Beyond Time will get your blood pumping and might have your brain wondering what we in the UK really gained from Brexit.

 

A sinister, word-spoken intro (‘Prelude To Massacre’) leads us to stand-out centrepiece ‘Steel On Ice’, with rapid-fire guitars to the fore once again. It’s all too fast to be sludge, too out-and-out stimulating to be stoner, too well-played and performed to be anything other than proper, good old-fashioned metal. Original? No. Satisfying? Yes, my good brothers – Yes!

 

A nice bass-led opening and an atmospheric rumble of thunder – adding up to ‘Taunter’s Theme’ – takes us into the chugging glory of ‘Tervakiituri’, a spiral of melding guitars, driven on mercilessly by the rhythm section of Otto Bigler (drums) and Heikki Nyman (bass). Eliel Salomaa’s vocals, with more than a touch of the Mustaine about them, are vital and suitably dramatic throughout, while Lauri Lyytinen and Salomaa combine for the impressive twin-guitar attack. ‘Tervakiituri’ showcases and emphasises their fretboard excellence while bringing the Scandi/Norse/Finnish/pagan origins to the fore like never before on the album.

 

‘Where Speedian Dwells’ keeps up the NWOBHM “tribute” and epic closing track ‘Lifetakers’ wraps up all that has gone before – the dual guitars, the pagan/occult influences, Salomaa’s spot-on, gravelly vocals, the melodies and the rhythms and the sludge and the doom and the groove, conjuring up a fractured vision of a blood-stained ravine, the snow and the warriors, the wraiths, circling the scene, and the hounds – the hounds are closing on us now, like demonic Exocets forming pincers through the white … then, fade to blood, and black.

 

But Green King will be back.

 

Buy the album here:

https://greenking.bandcamp.com/album/hidden-beyond-time

 

7 / 10

CALLUM REID