Metal Underground.com

Featuring all four Drudkh members and the drummer from Violent Omen, Blood Of Kingu is a “quasi-anonymous” band that doesn't bother with things like interviews or band photos, and instead focuses solely on the music. The group's third full-length, “Dark Star on the Right Horn of the Crescent Moon,” starts out promising, full of dark, menacing, and extreme black metal with a good sense of atmosphere. Unfortunately it quickly nosedives and never really recovers.

The vast majority of the album is the epitome of the worst black metal has to offer: unending blast beats that eventually stop being music and just become noise, and overly repetitious guitar work. The disc as a whole is overblown, repetitive, under produced, and highly derivative. But for minor differences in the chords being played, “Crowned Scarlet Moon Is Waiting For Eclipse,” “Enshrined In The Nethermost Lairs Beneath The Oceans,” and “The Bringer of Pestilence” are all essentially the exact same song.

Some extreme metal outfits in the blackened quadrant of metal – especially those with tags like “shoegaze” or “funeral” appended to their genre names - do this sound on purpose to draw in those who intently listen for each note through headphones and really devote time to the music. Hoping that was the case here, I kept waiting for that moment where the repetition would finally click and I'd realize I was being lulled into a trance-like state via Satanic hymns, but it just never came.

There are a few differences here and there that set the music apart and pique the interest briefly. The vocals, for instance, have a heavy filter applied, creating a sound that's somehow both guttural and mechanical. Tracks like “Sigil of the Watcher” also utilize loud clanging effects to give a hybrid industrial feel - think Aborym or Blacklodge, but significantly more repetitive and less energetic.

“He Who Is Not To Be Named” at least varies the tempo and adds in a slightly different tone from the surrounding material, although it suffers the same problem of constant repetition for it's run time. On the upside, you can also hear the bass in the track, and any black metal band that recognizes the existence of their bassist has to be given some kudos.

Oddly, the best songs on the album are the brief interludes like “Prayer To The Gods of Night.” They go the creepy horror movie soundtrack route and really nail the atmosphere, and its a shame more of that style wasn't interwoven with the full-length metal tracks, because that could have made the album much more interesting.

By the end of the disc, “Dark Star on the Right Horn of the Crescent Moon” honestly just becomes a wall of pointless, frenzied noise that's too messy to be worth hearing in general and too repetitive to be enjoyable as a black metal record specifically.