King 810
Memoirs of a Murderer

A band of controversy, King 810 from Flint, Michigan, USA. A story of a band taking masked men with assault rifles on stage, fans threatening concert workers with baseball bats and such things. A singer who was shot and suspected of beating up some guy real bad. The band is from a bad place, a ghetto where people are shot and murdered in alarming frequencies according to singer Gunn, who says there are unknown serial killers who are not even mentioned on national news, forgotten and violent is what Flint is as far as I can tell from the info I have found. A heritage of american society and a place I cannot even begin to relate to. I have never seen anyone who has been murdered, I don’t know anyone besides policemen I know who has. In Sweden we don’t have that kind of problem, very few are murdered, serial killers are something like less than ten through recorded history and it is a very safe place to be. So Flint is about as far from my reality as is possible, war would be further away of course. And this is what this band brings to their music, the life in an american ghetto.

They do it by going down the Nu-Metal/Hardcore route. Chugging riffs, aggressive shouty vocals, repetitive shouty choruses and some in between stuff which is calmer. And there are a few spoken parts as well. The singer sound typically male, he has no real singing voice and no storyteller voice either, just sounds like a guy. The production is okay, it is what you can expect from this kind of band at this moment in time. No surprises I would say. Sixteen tracks and the variation is decent as they do travel between emotion, spoken and sung through the album but in the end it comes down to an album that still tends to float together into a mass rather than something that opens up and takes you places. Many will most likely describe it as quite fragmented, and also point out that whatever these guys are trying on this album it has been done many times before.

It is not an album that blows me away. It doesn’t take me to the gutter, I think Streets or Gutter Ballet by Savatage does a much better job at that thing. It doesn’t put me on the streets of Flint where violence is an everyday reality. It doesn’t even offer me that amazing music, decent music in the large part but nothing that stand out to me. And to be honest it makes me even less interested in american ghetto life, my interest for the american citizens of Flint is at an all time low after hearing this album. After all, they have elected the system and the people that has created places like Flint themselves just like us Swedes has chosen to live in a country of socialism. I guess the land of the free means that you are free to be shot by a lunatic who just bought a gun at the local gun store, I’d take socialism over that any day. But to return to the music, what really ruins this album is not the violent outlines and the aggressive narrative, it is that it is so fragmented, it never takes flight and it doesn’t have the flow of a good album. Any good part tend to get broken down with a low tempo whisper part or something similar and you feel betrayed. These guys seem to show a bit of potential but never realises it, they are lost in the same decay as their hometown.

There is really nothing that stand out much in a positive regard, the american sounding Fat Around the Heart is the closest thing to a highlight this album has. It is an okay track. Othewise I feel that the violence and self pity is a bit too much for me, I think this album has an air of one guy feeling sorry for himself rather than narrating the memoirs of a murderer. It is less dark than the title suggests, less interesting than the title suggests, less everything. It is one of those album you just feel that they shouldn’t have passed some quality control. I think there is a lot to be desired here, but I don’t think this band will be able to deliver anything I desire in the future either as they seem to be to engulfed in their own self pity to really bother with the music. Maybe I am reading them wrong but I doubt anyone but fans of stereotypical Slipknotting can really be bothered with this album. In the end I have only one question: why bother?

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