Swedish death-thrash quintet The Crown is so awesome that their music overcomes your personal preferences and tastes. They represent a hot bikini fox that even your gf ogles, a burger whose aroma mesmerizes your vegan pals, a party joint on which squares toke sociably. So, extreme metallers can laud the quintet as the elite of their genre, while everybody else can say, “I’m not way into that scene, but I love The Crown.” They’re a common denominator, an irresistible force. Though their stuff is out there, it gets in you. Everybody saw Star Wars. Everybody reads In Cold Blood. Everybody can love The Crown. This is my belief srs.

And there’s more Crown to love as of last week when they announced their second reunion with original vocalist Johan Lindstrand. This follows a hiatus-breaking entry in the Crown discography, the tight, monochromatic Doomsday King (with ex-God Macabre screamer Jonas Stålhammer). It’s an unusual Crown album, admits guitarist Marko Tervonen, and one made under “difficult” circumstances. Its reception was unusual too: Some fans perceived a thematic about-face by the devilish Crown and firmly decried Doomsday‘s Christian-ish tone. About this mild backlash, a friendly and laughy Tervonen spoke with MetalSucks last week between answering a billion questions about the brief Stålhammer era, his awesome strategy for The Crown’s next classic album (forecast for a late Spring release), the new opportunity to reunite with Lindstrand, their slight tour schedule, families, friends, confusable album titles, and the songwriting arsenal/ball-crunching power of the “properly” reunited Crown.

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In all the excitement of The Crown’s reactivation, I’ve only recently stopped to wonder about their forthcoming seventh album’s title, Doomsday King. That is, I’m pretty sure about its meaning (this, right?), but can’t quite see the wisdom of a title so similar to 2000′s Deathrace King. Why court buyer confusion? Of course, there may be a thematic link or insider connection between the two albums. But if so, such a salient marketing point would certainly pop up in the press release. Hmm, I’m not seeing anything, although guitarist Marko Tervonen told me in December that Doomsday King “sounds like the bastard son of Deathrace King and Possessed 13.” Huh. Does that explain it?

For now, one thing we can clear up now is another Crown catalogue question: Which is the superior version of The Crown’s fifth record? Is it Crowned In Terror (1999) featuring then ex-At The Gates screamer Tomas Lindberg or its 2004 remake, Crowned Unholy, with longtime Crown frontman Jonas Lindstrand on the mic? For the intense Crown fan, each is required listening; everybody else shouldn’t be caught without at least one of the collection of these fucking brilliant Crown songs. So which is for you? Read on:

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Man, you just gotta love Dream Evil. The band has gone to painstaking measures to make sure the “show” in this video looks as bad-ass as possible by creating a giant “Dream Evil” backdrop light sign, dropping in a ludicrously huge wall of amp cabinets, inviting a CGI audience to attend (!) and dubbing in fake crowd noises. One guitarist (not Fredrik Nordstron) is wearing fur. The song is about banging your fucking head, a tried and true metal topic that will never be overdone. These guys are complete and total dorks and not ashamed of it at all. This isn’t quite what I had in mind when I advocated keeping metal videos inexpensive, but this video couldn’t have cost that much to make and I’ll be damned if it doesn’t do the trick.

In short, this video is fucking fantastic. There is nothing not to love about it. Long live Dream Evil!

-VN

These are some of my favorite producers and mixers for heavy music… It’s a challenging genre, and these guys are great in my opinion.

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