Review by Rosh on December 25, 2023.

Coming up with things to say about the latest side project and/or supergroup of pioneering metal musicians initially offers quite a bit of novelty, but after checking out enough of these hyped-up one-off affairs, you start to realize that your lead-in comments all sound nearly identical. The big names involved are always the first to get thrown out there, followed pretty quickly by how it sounds relative to said big name musicians' big name bands. It is seldom anything groundbreaking for these kinds of veterans who've completed album cycle after album cycle, tour after tour, year after year (often amounting to a few decades at this point), and if it is, it's not usually remembered in nearly as fond of a light as their main bodies of work. The latter phenomenon makes it difficult to write in a highly original vein while still appealing to diehard fans accustomed to business as usual, but in the former case, we see our most loyal maniacs exhibiting a different tendency - assimilation rather than rejection. Essentially, within just a few years of an album release by a side project whose musical style isn't too far off from the founders' main band (by which point any initial hype has long since vanished), the fans who still remember these albums will just lump them into the discography of the main band, for all practical purposes anyway.

And so it has been with Leif Edling's The Doomsday Kingdom project, which released its sole album in 2017, sandwiched in time between the unfocused, although decent, string of releases making up Candlemass' 2010's output. The odds and ends he'd composed in his primary doom metal powerhouse, ranging from 2012's Psalms for the Dead (after which he parted ways with singer Rob Lowe, leaving us with a trilogy of Candlemass-Aeturnus albums) to the 2016 Mats Leven-fronted EP Death Thy Lover (a token of appreiciation to the fans which celebrates 30 years of Epicus Doomicus Metallicus) were only a sliver of what the influential epic doom four-stringer had been up to in the years leading up to TDK's self-titled album. If we are to deviate from the lens of "it's all Candlemass for crying out loud!", just for the sake of closer examination, then the release of a third, and for now, final, Krux album (a project wherein Leif had previously collaborated with the aforementioned Mats Leven) in 2011, as well as his two album stint with Avatarium, provide a logical backdrop for the formation of a project such as The Doomsday Kingdom. It was about time yet another nemesis to all his other bands revealed its ugly face, on this occasion with the guitarist and the drummer of Avatarium by his side.

Except, The Doomsday Kingdom is not all that ugly or sullen of a doom metal album, not in comparison to the ultra-heavy, earth-splitting doom of albums like Krux, King of the Grey Islands, or even some of the chunkier riffs of Death Thy Lover anyway. It is a touch more melodic in the sense of Avatarium (as one would expect considering who's laying down the riffs and percussion), and Edling himself, although finally donning the endearing stagename "The Doomfather" for this outing, is, by his own admission, writing with more of a traditional heavy metal sensibility. Now, with this description of the sound in mind, I'm not exactly sure why Mats Leven wasn't chosen to record vocals for this album as well, as his charismatic and smooth tenor (I think, it doesn't really matter) voice would have suited every track here just fine, but instead we get the dude from (Sweden's) Wolf handling vocals (probably for the $ame reason Mr. $ession $inger was brought back for The Door to Doom) and, to his credit, it still sounds like grade-A, cleanly produced, epic-ish heavy/doom metal.

Of course, The Doomfather is primarily to be thanked for the memorable songwriting, abundance of solid riffs, and varied tracklist (usurping his own work found on any of the last 3 Candlemass full-lengths at the time of writing this). Tributes to his influences are done tastefully and don't excessively pilfer from his own backlog of material, instead crafting each song more methodically in what can be described as a back-to-basics, bottom-up approach this time around. "Silent Kingdom" is quite a nice apocalyptic note to kick off this particular doomsday with, even among other strong openers from the then-most-recent Candlemass albums (all three Lowe-fronted full-lengths had surely delivered on this front), while "The Never Machine" proves itself an infectious heavy/doom metal single that sports an overtone just bleak enough amid its charging power-chord battering to debatably be one of Edling's signature songs. Songs such as these, or the familiarly energetic palm-muted sixteenth-note ride of "Hand of Hell" are each of examples of "consciously generic" or "deliberately conservative" metal songwriting, in a fashion self-aware enough to make for a convincingly intense experience, enhanced by pronounced leads that breathe new life into the established rhythms responsible for Edling and co.'s riffcraft (for example, the quality of Hand of Hell's badass-yet-boilerplate riff immediately goes up a few notches during the bridge once the solo hits, not unlike a much heavier song, aptly titled "Elephant Star", from... well, From the 13th Sun).

The Doomsday Kingdom goes at least a decade back in time further than the era of that (overlooked) release however, brandishing "The Sceptre" as more of a full-blown epic doom metal song that would only require a bit of reworking to have been a tune suitable for any of the albums in the original Messiah Marcolin trilogy. It's a superior lurcher of a doom metal song to "A Spoonful of Darkness" in every respect, which sits on the opposite side of the acoustic filler track fluffing up this album, but I'll admit I enjoy the campier nature of the latter more than even the (non-delusional!) grandeur of the former. How excellent then, that the (good kind of) campy cheese should continue on the closing track, a space-y ballad titled "The God Particle", sung by The Doomfather himself! I genuinely love this song, it's one of those contemplative, soulful doom songs that grows on the listener due to its tranquil and wisened edge, making the vocal performance by everyone's favorite epicus doomicus metallicus bassisticus ever more welcome.

The Doomsday Kingdom is a project I doubt we'll see more material from, especially with Candlemass' late-career reboot in 2019, but this album was a highly intriguing and enjoyable snapshot of what their remarkably prolific heart and soul had been doing in the years leading up to this resurrection, while himself battling chronic fatigue and a diminished capacity for touring. I'm hereby advising that those still keeping up with the endeavors of epic doom's most important institution also take the time to enjoy The Doomsday Kingdom, as this album is a testament to the sort of chops that made Leif Edling's songwriting so formidable to begin with, in an era where his material had become a bit rehashed. Whether or not he'll reach this level of quality again in his career is unknown, but the relatively recent outing that is the The Doomsday Kingdom is proof that he's very likely still capable.

Rating: 9 out of 10