Albums That Will #$@&%*! Your Face Off in 2014: Black Crown Initiate, TBA

Black Crown Initiate
TBA
Release Date – TBA

Last January Axl Rosenberg proclaimed that Rivers of Nihil’s debut album would provide extreme face fuckage in the year to come (was he right, or what?). For the second year in a row we feature a band from Reading, Pennsylvania, a backwater Appalachian town best known to the world as the namesake of a railroad in Monopoly. But if Reading keeps churning out promising young bands like Rivers of Nihil and Black Crown Initiate people may start talking about the mid-2010s Southeastern Pennsylvania death metal scene in the same vaunted tones they currently reserve for early ’90s Tampa. They might even learn how to pronounce the city’s name properly (rhymes with “bedding”).

Credit MetalSucks scribe Dave Mustein with the find: he featured the band in an August 2013 column, catching the eye of the metal industry and unknowingly setting off a chain of events that would lead to them landing a plum spot as the opening band on this year’s Metal Alliance Tour with Behemoth and Goatwhore. He also named their Song of the Crippled Bull EP as his sixth favorite release of 2013, extremely high praise for just 20 minutes of music. But the guy is absolutely right on the money: the EP’s got it all, from crushing death metal blasts to slow, podding, deliberate (and catchy as fuck) riffs to searing guitar solos to delicate, classical-inspired passages and everything in between. It’s that rare beast that’ll both catch your ear on first listen and keep getting better and better each time. To boil it down to easily digestible comparisons, I’d liken it to Opeth meets 7 Horns 7 Eyes.

So what’s in store for Black Crown Initiate in 2014? Besides the aforementioned dream tour and an appearance at New England Metal and Hardcore Fest, we’re sure the band will end up on a major metal label before long because they’re just too good not to, and, hopefully, they’ll churn out a full length album. If that prediction ends up being false it’ll only be because they couldn’t quite squeak it in before the close of the year. It’ll definitely fuck your face off either way.

Stream Song of the Crippled Bull below.