Fallen Kings and Rusted Crowns

Imagine this, a power metal album with melodeath touches, and folk metal tropes, that isn't silly, or an echo of bad videogame music. Colour us surprised. Duskmourn have delivered a really professionally assembled album, with great cover art, great production, great instrumentation, and lyrics fit for purpose and not the ramblings of a 13 year old's history notebook. Fallen Kings and Rusted Crowns is dripping in atmosphere, full of great autumnal misty melodies and intriguing tempo shifts, and hints of ethnic instruments, and restrained, sombre keyboards. The vocals range from death growls to raspy yells, like mid 00s Amorphis, but hardier and less melodic.

The riffs on Fallen Kings... are sometimes folky, clouds breaking into epic faster passages, and the melodeath timbre sometimes even ekes over into black metal. Duskmourn present us what we needed from this kind of metal decades ago, and put bigger bands to shame by delivering atmosphere and authenticity, and high level composition. Fallen Kings... shows you can mix the major-key ideas of folk metal, with melodeath, and tiny ice shards of black metal, without sounding contrived or incoherent. The slower, regal stomp of Deathless is offset with piano counterpoints and mournful, majesterial death growls,

Under the burning stars in Night’s sky
On mirrors below her crown revealed to me
Ancient gateways in a face of silver

Pleasingly, the bass is very high in the mix with a rusty metallic tone, relatively un-augmented, always driving the riffs forward, and seated just a little under the snare and double-kick patterns. The production on Fallen Kings... is really impressive; a soundstage has been created with full power, but also restrained enough to sound clear, and respectful of each instrument, no wall of sound here. Rather, its the emotionality of the music that shines, not its volume. The interweaving of acoustic guitars, chimes, effects, and keyboards is incredibly well-done, and lends a sense of historicity to the music, even though the lyrics are generally typical for the genre, dealing as they do with mythology, and historical narratives, mostly fantastical, but with a little esoteric flavour also. This isn't sub-Tolkien nonsense, that's for sure.

So, a bunch of Americans have come up with the goods in a genre you'd expect Europeans to have nailed down completely, and if you didn't know, you'd be convinced Duskmourn were striding forth out of some Scandinavian winter forest, and only the very subtle touches of Mastodon, might give a hint otherwise. Mountain Heart is a rousing mid-pace number, full of hard rock riffs, chugging riffs, and releases of soaring melody like it's Oulu in 1993. The only criticism of Fallen Kings and Rusted Crowns is that the band doesn't celebrate it's faster, slightly blackened moments enough, and there's a certain falling back onto mid-paced song structures and riffs that could do a tiny bit more, and end up meaning a heck of a lot more.

In any event, there's almost nothing not to like with Duskmourn, apart from their tendency to drift into tempo-complacency here and there, and Fallen Kings... have certainly mostly arisen.