its a good album. Simple as that.

This was my sentiment and level of expectation going into this. And holy shit, did I not anticipate it to be this good. Reminds me a lot of my favorite MA album, FFF. It's kind of like the same beast, aged and with some extra in the gut area, but the youthful spryness intact and its hate matured. Erik Rutan's production is top-notch and Scott Fuller is a way better replacement for Pete than Tim Yeung was.

"Come to Finland!"

I think that people will critisize it now for being 'safe' and all of that, but fast forward a few years and those same people will be saying how much of a classic it is. That seems to be a bit of a trend with online commentators these days. New stuff gets criticized for being new, but people open their eyes in time. And I think the album rocks.

That has certainly happened with bands like Iron Maiden, Judas Priest, Cannibal Corpse, and some of the bad Morbid Angel albums. Of course it actually demonstrates the opposite of what you are claiming, as it was their initial reaction that was right and time has only caused them to forget how disappointing it was when this stuff came out. Safe means safe, not un-listenable, so going back and no longer having those feelings of disappointment, people hear safe, average music they can run in the background inoffensively. Naturally people they aren't going to continue extreme criticism of music that isn't eliciting any emotional reaction from them.

Sure seems like a lot of you guys are bothered that people don't like this album...

I can actually respect rexxz's posts - he seems to have really genuinely listened to this and it makes me actually want to give it another shot. Who knows if I'll dig it though.

i think i'm on my fourth listen-through right now* (maybe fifth?), and as i suspected after my first listen, it's grown on me quite a bit. at this point it really feels like the album is front-loaded with all the filler, and the best stuff is in the middle/end. there's something about the drumming that doesn't quite sit right with me, but i can't put my finger on it - may just be the mixing. the first listens of the album really didn't leave me with much - it felt like pretty decent basic dm, but rather in one ear; out the other, but now that i've given it a little more time, tracks 7,8,9 have stood out to me. that last minute of pillars is some groovy fucking rock'n'roll! i should also say i prefer my morbid angel with david on vocals, and i rate altars and covenant head and shoulders above the rest of their discography, but i have nothing against tucker either, and i if i had to pick a #3 album from them, it could be blessed, formulas or gateways depending on the day of the week and the price of tea in china

i'm pretty sure it won't show up on my year-end top 10 list, but i'd say it's a good, solid album, and a welcome return to form for morbid angel. after i've let them both sink in some more, i could probably rate this about the same as the new cannibal corpse, maybe higher - granted i was never the biggest cc fan

* actually just finished as i was finishing up the post

I never care who likes or dislikes what; I just sometimes take stances against what I think are inaccurate and more than likely hyperbolic descriptions of things. Fair play if you don't like what you hear but at least describe it correctly in objective terms. An opinion is one thing but when folks start claiming things like I pointed out earlier, it crosses an imaginary line into what seems to be petty disparagement.

No one is obliged to have any sort of opinion on anything, they are what they are. But we should at least be mature about our assessments and also respect other people's preferences, and that stands for everyone no matter what their view on the subject matter is. I think I've said it before but I believe the lines get super blurred when attempting to discuss both an objective and subjective assessment of any given piece of media in the same short space of a few paragraphs.

For sure. There's very little objectively that can be said when discussing the merits of any kind of art - the most you can say is 'a lot of people look at this piece of art favorably,' to which the answer could easily just be 'well, I don't agree with them at all.'

People will be hyperbolic a lot. That 0% review for this a day or two after release was a big example.

It's a valuable thing to discuss both the objective and subjective experiences, but due to the very nature of that kind of discourse there will inevitably be a lot of nebulous statements that might conflate one of those with the other. I myself am not perfect in this regard, but I do my best and I am certainly open to criticisms in my own assessments. I just try my best to avoid disagreeing with someone's personal experience, but every so often you get a line that makes you wonder if someone is even listening to the same album you are. That double bass comment, for example. There's certainly a good amount of that on here but you can just trust me (or not, and listen over and over for yourself like I have) when I say that less than 20% of the total playtime of this album contains measures or bars consisting of nonstop double kick without any alteration of the pattern. It's simply just an untrue statement to make, and then when your opinion of what you're hearing is affected by that perception and you state as much, that's where I have problems.

I'm actually kinda digging this now. Don't know if I'll love it like I did their old shit, but it's a nice heavy, bludgeoning hammer of an album with some cool grooves. Safe would be the wrong word - it's not the same thing as something like Surgical Steel. They wanted to do something unrelentingly heavy and bludgeoning it seems, with no real moments of letting-up until the very end.

edit: My impression from the first listen, that they were just bludgeoning away in a repetitive manner, I can still see that as well - but I think they were going for this type of steamrolling brutality with no room to breathe. They wanted to create a suffocating, claustrophobic atmosphere.

Shitty mix but it'll do. I'm a bit letdown but then again I'm very selective when it comes to MA. In an year rife with killer death metal of all sorts this doesn't really do a whole lot for me. It has it moments but nah.

First listen had a couple standouts, but was mostly in one ear out the other. After about four listens I am really getting into it though. At the very least its a solid assault of an album and has some really catchy grooves and rhythmic changes that keep it interesting instead of slipping into a blastfest which some tracks seem like they will. Loving the drums throughout the whole album.

This the album of the year. Trey is a genius. Naysayers would be fellating this if it was a Mithras album, or by some obscure band only they knew about. Those winding, Azagthothian church spire riffs that sound like you're caught inside a cyclone are pure Viagra. Praise be their heaviest and most brutal album to date. I personally kinda like that they held back on leads and solos and whatnot - no frills, no 'atmospheric' shit to draw in apathetic extreme metal voyeurs, just feel-it-in-your-soul fucking death metal.

I really love all the songs but the ones that have resonated strongest have been The Righteous Voice, Architect and Iconoclast and Garden of Disdain.

I don't think so.

I'd bet money on it.

Again - people sure do seem to be unable to accept that not everyone enjoys the things they like. Pretty immature view.

Maybe I was being a bit hyperbolic, it just seemed like some were making their KD listening experience a political one instead of a musical one.

Hi Trey.

pft don't I wish brother lol

Cool. For you.

I like Kingdoms considerably more than Ilud and Heretic. I can't really see why other fans of Formulas or Gateways wouldn't like it. Perhaps it could use a bit more "lava" here and there, but it's still a really solid, crushing DM album.

Finally got the album today. After one listen I'm surprisingly more impressed than I thought I'd be. Needs more listens but so far so good.

Got the lenticular digipak, as well. Looks nice.

It sounds like a Morbid Angel album.
But to me, not a very good one. I recognise that Trey must feel caught between a rock and a hard place here. I can't beleive I'm saying this though, but I can totally understand how some might actually feel like I was more interesting than this one. At least with I, I suppose, you really didn't know what to expect. There aren't even any weird instrumentals on this one. A lot of the guitarwork sounds "colourless" or even uninspired, to my ears. I do find myself getting slightly more into the album as it goes on, and there are bits that make my ears perk up, like the solos, when they appear, and the odd riff that calls to mind some of the early material. I'm not a fan of the drumming for the most part, and the insitence on playing million-mile-an-hour double kicks even during the slow parts. Just not my thing. I'll always enjoy a good deal of A through F but I can't see myself returning to K very often. I hope people enjoy it though and that Trey and Co. are proud of what they've accomplished.

Listened to this right after Gateways and I gotta say, this album sounds way more intense and angry than anything they've done since like Covenant. The G album sounds refined and regal in comparison. And as others have mentioned, there are some interesting things happening amid that drum-heavy clamorous mix. Despite MA being one of my favorite dm bands, this wouldn't make my top ten but probably my top twenty.

Wow, that's harsh . I actually think this album is far weirder and more experimental than anything on Illud - just as an example, take a track like "Declaring New Law", which is basically an industrial song played in a death metal style. Sure it's subtle, but it works a lot better than when they just haphazardly glued the two styles together on the mess that was "Too Extreme!!", for example and is objectively superior in every conceivable way .

Well, Illud just threw curve ball after curve ball. Can anyone honestly say they weren't stunned after listening to it? With this one even the weird bits are much more anticipated.

I dunno about stunned - annoyed, maybe. Illud was surprising in a way but it wasn't really executed in any kind of good manner. Kingdoms is stodgy and homogenous but it's got a kind of crushing rage and technicality like an above poster said that makes it work - it's not THAT safe.

It just so happens Decaring New Law is the worst song on the album too.

I remember Trey slagging other death metal bands for their riffs "lacking resonance." The bands he slagged on still were Morbid Angel fans even though he targeted them. And rightfully, he has written so many amazing riffs compared to others, when he created quality albums he had the right to criticize and motivate others.

This new album lacks resonance, lacks flow. Sounds confused and undeveloped. This new drummer has agility but lacks creativity and the production of his drums certainly sounds awful. His fills are overloaded with double bass instead of creative hand work, and he repeats the same mehanical fills over and over.distracts from everything else going on.

Groove riffson DEAD, no thanks. Disco beats on Declafing New Law, no thanks. A couple songs sounding like actual metalcore written by 22 year olds. I'll pass on this one. Maybe in the next 8 years Trey will take time perfecting riffs back to former glory and their drummer will learn to create with his hands and not just his feet.

Of course many people are satisfied because it's loud and fast and heavy!

And wouldn't you agree that the half of the album that was actual death metal was extremely safe, tired, and streamlined? People seem to have forgotten that shit actually existed (not that I blame them ). My point was that while yes, Illud was "stunning", that was all it was - the experimental nature was completely superficial. There's nothing deeper to glean from a track like "Too Extreme!!"...ever try and listen to all 6+ minutes of it? Notice how it never actually does anything....it never even tries, at it's core it's just an extremely boring, repetitive collection of awful annoying sounds. The same is true of every single one of the experimental tracks on that album...it's all superficial, surface-level experimentation that has nothing to say beyond shock value. The opposite is true of this album. It's still experimental, but those elements are much more subtle and well-integrated, and it feels like the songs were put together with a lot more care and precision - and may take repeated listens to even pick up on.

Exactly, yeah, it was all quite blandly written and dumb in a way. It's easy to look at Kingdoms and accuse it of being more of the same, stagnant, etc, but there was effort put into making interesting metal songs on it. Illud was really just a spectacle not only for the experimenting, but also for how dull and lame everything about it from the playing to the vocals was. Nothing at all sounded good and there was no cleverness. I would've loved a song like "God of Emptiness" with some techno-ish backing, creepy electronic ambiance and the like... that's not what we got.

killer death metal cd

altars of madness
blessed are the sick
covenant
domiantion
entangled in chaos
formuals fatal to flesh
gateways to anilation
hertic
ill div diveidum
kingdoms disdained

LOL okay thanks for that.

In terms of Kingdoms Disdained, I've listened to it a number of times and I'm really enjoying this one. There's some really warped riffing and the songs are very engaging. Personally, it might be their best one since Formulas. A very nice comeback for this band.

Why does everyone always forget Juvenilia?

EDIT: And regarding my thoughts on the album, I've only heard it once, but I wasn't a big fan. If I were to pick it apart song-by-song, however, the songwriting quality varied quite significantly. In particular, "The Righteous Voice" stood out as my favorite song with its fast, catchy riffs. I generally don't like Morbid Angel's slower songs, and the ones on this album seemed to be particularly bad. 63% was the number I had in mind when I finished listening to the album, and I just noticed that happens to be the average rating for the album on this site. Some cool things like the faster songs and the production, some lame things like most of the slower songs... and it all balances out to a "meh."

Exactly. There are so many people jizzing all over this album because it's so br00tal. It's brutally bad. Lol I really believe that people like it because it's not Illud. There is a shitload of better death metal that was released this year.

When I find one in the bargin bin I'll pick it up. I don't think it's flat out terrible. I don't think it's flat out bad. it's just sorta there. at best it sounds like undeveloped ideas from Formulas with leftover or throwaway riffs from Gateways with some of the song structuring from heretic. it kinda seems more of a rush job overall. These songs i feel would be better overall if they wrote them, then gestated, jammed, demoed and then came back to them after a year of writing. i think with that refinement We might have had something a bit more noteworthy. I mean the solos and atmosphere is half the appeal of MA for me. I don't have much bad to say about the drummer, he sounds like a better fit than Tim. production overall is alright enough that i wouldn't nitpick it too much. I just feel the guitars could be a bit more defined be it less mud it's odd I can't place exactly what's so off about them. i figured since everyone else put their cent in I would too. so yea i'll probably pick this up used. and the cover looks like an expansion for world of warcraft which at first I hate but thinking of it like that I don't mind now.

Finally listened to it. It's OK. It's not bad and it's no "Covenant".

The best thing about it is the new drummer. He carries on for Pete surprisingly well.

The songwriting needs improvement.

I'm with you on this one. I'm hearing very vague complaints of song-writing but they aren't specific and I'm finding that the songs are really well-written. It sounds a more similar to other modern DM bands than previous MA offerings used to, which I'm really enjoying. I can't speculate exactly why people dislike this album (each for their own reasons I'm sure), but I'm aware a large amount of MA fans simply don't like modern death metal. Most people I know who listen to a lot of metal music think anything heavier than old MA or classic DM drifts into "pure noise" territory, and perhaps a lot of MA fans might be feeling that here.