REVIEW: Heavy Lies the Crown – The Rapture [EP/2012]
Artist: Heavy Lies the Crown
Album: The Rapture [EP]
Rating: 4.75/5
The English really have the sound dialed when it comes to groovy, slamming deathcore. With giants like Ingested, Nexilva, Martyr Defiled and Bound by Exile already under their belt, it seems their thirst for more is all but insatiable. To boot, it would seem the British waistline is only expanding with addition of Heavy Lies the Crown, and their new three-track EP, The Rapture, which shows an enormous amount of proficiency and potential with deathcore in a remarkably short run time.
While The Rapture is a short commentary on Heavy Lies the Crown’s abilities, it speaks more than loudly enough for their skills to compensate for its brevity. From start to finish, The Rapture beats the listener over the head with twelve minutes of unyielding brutality. Heavy Lies the Crown borrow and re-work elements established from their first release, The Family Demise to make this EP a dynamic beast both vocally and instrumentally.
The Rapture is a juggernaut of seemingly unstoppable brutality. The drums race along at a break-neck pace, the guitars barreling alongside them, destroying everything in their path. Shortly behind them, the low, guttural vocals rampage, paving everything the instruments have demolished in their bloodlust-driven path to your ear drums. While that could just as easily describe the ending to “DDK” or the churning introduction to “Resistance,” it works for the whole album. The instruments are constantly on their game, pushing relentlessly forward, slamming the listener into the pavement non-stop until, finally, a switch flips, and the constantly churning and gnashing machine stutters and grinds into a devastating breakdown.
At the drop of a time–maybe a speedy drum fill, or a quick harmonic–the nature of the beast that is The Rapture changes entirely. Once blaring along, the tempo drops markedly as the deathcore and groove laden tendencies of the band change into a beatdown, in-your-face style heavy section. Not to say that the rest of the material hasn’t been blistering, but the breakdowns are all but lethal. Punchy drums and muddy, grinding guitar create a backdrop upon which the low, bitter vocals spit lyrics of anguish and hate. If the two-step laden riffs hadn’t been mosh friendly enough, the breakdowns certainly make up for it.
In their search to create a blend of groove, beatdown and deathcore, the United Kingdom’s Heavy Lies the Crown might have found perfection with The Rapture. A consistently enjoyable experience from beginning to end (even if that is a slightly cliff-hanging twelve minutes), the EP is nothing short of a sign of veritable prodigy. In a manner deceptively true to their name, not only does the crown lie heavy, but The Rapture does as well.
By Connor Welsh/Eccentricism
