Bandcamp There is a thread running through King in Yellow, the second album from Passau five-piece Leviathan Rising, that pulls in two directions at once: up toward the doomed royalty of Robert W. Chambers, with track titles like “Visions of Carcosa” and the title cut, and down into the crushing dark of the deep sea, “Marianas Trench,” “Drowned Colossus,” “Call from Below.” Cosmic horror above and below the surface, in other words, and the band score it with a heavier, stranger sound than their self-applied doom-stoner-sludge tags might suggest.
What the record actually plays like is atmospheric post-metal with sludge and doom in its bones. Songs open in spacious, reverbed quiet, ambient guitars and synth pads setting a scene, before the band crash in with a fuzzed, downtuned wall. The vocals are the most divisive element, swinging between clean, almost incantatory singing, deep guttural growls and layered, raw screams, and they do not always land cleanly, the harmonized cleans in particular wandering off pitch here and there. When it works, though, it really works. “Marianas Trench” is the best thing here, a genuine slow build from intimate clean picking into a massive wall of sound, the dynamics breathing the way the whole album wants to. “Wandering Wizard” pulls a similar trick, its eruption around the two-and-a-half-minute mark perfectly set up by the hush before it.
The recurring problem is the master, and it is inconsistent rather than uniformly bad. Several tracks are given room, “Marianas Trench,” “Wandering Wizard” and the sludgy “Drowned Colossus” all keep their dynamic swing. But others are run hot into the loudness wall and pay for it: “Monstrosity” fatigues the ear with hyper-compressed, glossy sheen, “Riptide” sounds cold and sample-driven with the drums sounding triggered and flat, and “Cult of the Serpent” pins the limiter to the ceiling and strips out the depth. The contrast is jarring, and it undersells the ambition of the writing.
That ambition is real, and it is what keeps King in Yellow worth your time. This is a band reaching past the genre tags they were handed, building cinematic, concept-driven heaviness out of cosmic dread and ocean depth, and on its best tracks landing it. A steadier, more consistent master and a little more discipline on the clean vocals would turn a promising, atmospheric heavy record into a properly memorable one. For now it is an ambitious, flawed, genuinely interesting listen.
King in Yellow moves between spacious, reverbed quiet and a fuzzed, downtuned wall of sound, with vocals that range from clean incantation to deep growls and raw screams. At its best the production breathes: “Marianas Trench” and “Wandering Wizard” build from intimate clean passages into massive heavy peaks with the dynamics intact. The weakness is consistency. Several tracks are mastered hot into the loudness wall, “Monstrosity” turning glossy and fatiguing, “Riptide” sounding cold and triggered, “Cult of the Serpent” flattening the depth out entirely. There is also some rough intonation on the harmonized clean vocals, and frequency stacking in the low mids that blurs the heavy sections. Ambitious and atmospheric, but the uneven master and a few loose vocal moments hold it back.
Standout tracks: Marianas Trench, Wandering Wizard
