“The Black Powder” (Released May 31st) is the fourth album from Lord Vicar. It was, like the previous album “Gates of Flesh”, recorded by audio wizard Joona Lukala at Noise for Fiction studio in Turku, Finland. All studio work took place in February and March of 2019. The studio has the benefit of a huge live room which gave the band the opportunity to capture a sound that breathes with the ambience of the space, but maintains the sonic weight for which they are rightly known.
This album is a return to longer form, and even more progressive song structures, but the punchier material is also provided with merciless precision, as well as soothing acoustic moments. The songwriting duties are shared by Kimi and Gareth, also Chritus providing lyrical output.
The album contains a loose lyrical concept relating to mankind’s endless lack of reason and weakness of stability, resulting to violence, war, manipulation of children, and numbing our minds in order to shut out the horror that is the reality we live in. We blow the black lines to feel good. This takes place generation after generation, in an endless cycle of standing and falling. Musically and lyrically the album covers a wide spectrum of textures from the all out punky attack of ’The Temple in the Bedrock’, fragile beauty of ‘Nightmare’, to the oppressive menace of the more intense moments of ‘Sulphur, Charcoal and Saltpetre’. This album is a grower, meant to be listened repeatedly, full of subtle details that reveal themselves with each subsequent listen.
’But children of that place remain with us
They illustrate the burden of our lies
And make us feel the hell of all those memories
Buried in the grave of the fireflies’
Line up:
Chritus – Vocals
Kimi Kärki – Guitars
Richard Jones – Bass
Gareth Millsted – Drums
Country: Finland, Sweden, UK, Switzerland
Genre: Doom Metal
