Album review: Khemmis – Khemmis

Blacksmithing hasn’t changed much in the last couple of millennia. It's still basically the old art of shaping hot metal between swinging hammer and unsympathetic anvil. You might add a serrated edge to one piece, or tap a decorative ruby into another, but mostly the game remains the same.

Khemmis’ take on heavy music is similarly unevolved. Five albums in, the Colorado crew are still working to the epic doom blueprint laid out by Swedish icons Candlemass. They throw in nods to fellow American heavyweights Pallbearer and YOB, and European counterparts like Green Lung and Grand Magus here and there, but they never lose sight of the old guard who paved the way. So pure is the inspiration running through Invocation Of The Dreamer, Corpsebloom Garden and Grief’s Reverie that, thrillingly, it never feels like any kind of cheap imitation, rather an honourably cultured continuation.

“When we started this band, we had no expectations, no assumptions. We just wanted to play heavy metal,” frontman Ben Hutcherson explains of his outfit’s enduring throwback attitude. “The older I get, the more I appreciate how rare it is in life to have relationships that last this long and offer a sense of stability and reassurance in a world that increasingly is horrifying and unsuitable for human life. And so, in many ways, this band is a home.”

Not that there’s much homely on offer here. Evoking visions of dark wizards commanding brimming stormclouds and dragons raining fire down on stony castle keeps, the swooping Beneath The Scythe and glimmering Gilded Chambers are gleefully fantastical. Tomb Of Roses toys with melancholy, but ultimately portrays death as ultimate defiance. Then Carrion King, meanwhile, layers on death metal, trailing rotten flesh in its brilliantly cataclysmic wake.

Chances are if listeners don’t have leather gauntlets or a well-worn battle jacket tucked somewhere in the closet, Khemmis might feel a bit too rich and ripe. But this is sweet meat for the indoctrinated. And towering closer Benediction Tones is a grandstanding punctuation point, ready to play as legions of metalheads raise the horns.

Verdict: 4/5

For fans of: Candlemass, Pallbearer, Green Lung

Khemmis is released on June 12 via Nuclear Blast