King Woman ‘Celestial Blues’ Review: Kris Esfandiari returns with a punishing and rewarding follow-up to 2017 debut.
Musical busy bee Kris Esfandiari has a host of musical projects, including the industrial tinged NGHTCRWLR, the shoegaze driven Miserable and the poppy Sugar High. But fans of her work with the doom metal outfit King Woman will be happy to learn she’s back with Celestial Blues (July 30, Relapse), the long awaited sophomore effort to 2017’s Created In The Image of Suffering.
Picking up where that album left, off Celestial Blues sets the mood with the title track and opening number, which begins in hushed atmospherics, with Esfandiari’s whispered vocals hanging in the air like a haze over languid, narcotic guitar lines before succumbing to a harrowing doom metal riff.
Its that mix of the bruising and beautiful, the ethereal and the feral, that acts as the album’s sonic template, taking a cue from 90’s alternative rock, which adds a new wrinkle to their sound, including Boghz, which varies from a skeletal Goth guitar intro before going into hyper drive with cavernous guitars and shrieking vocals, or Golgotha, which emits dreamy, cinematic atmosphere over a Paint It Black style riff and backing cello over musings like I heard the virgin is having a baby/Immaculate conception can you save me?
Morning Star takes another cue from the Rolling Stones (and biblical imagery), with the Sympathy For The Devil’ish opening line my name is Lucifer pleased to meet you, followed by lyrics that warn against any judgment towards the Dark Lord: “You know it could have been you/So don’t you dare judge the things that I do. Her vocals shift from lovely and hushed to guttural wailing, with guitarist/bassist Peter Arensdorf and drummer Joseph Raygoza matching her dynamic intensity.
Coil is a sonic collage marrying jazzy percussion and Sabbath-worthy riffs over a soundscape akin to Bauhaus at their most caustic, while the ominous Entwined feels like the musical offspring of Pink Floyd’s Hey You with a hint of Chelsea Wolfe.
King Woman has of course, been compared to Wolfe in the past, but its important to note a distinction; while the latter is no stranger to mixing doom metal and torch song atmospherics, there is always the eventual melodic reprieve from the darkness.
Celestial Blues offers no such comforts, being as oppressive and assaulting as the likes of SWANS or Neurosis, with the unsettling dream logic of a night terror or Lynchian horror film. While it has moments of calm, it remains disquieting, waiting for the musical shoe to drop into more aggressive territory.
This is highlighted on the appropriately titled Psychic Wound, which Esfandiari describes as being about paying the price for eating forbidden fruit, and it sounds it. The track’s unrelenting pace is matched by blood-curdling screams and disorienting melodies,
The album ends with the more subdued and calming Paradise Lost, with a Slowdivey riff and hypnotic, cooing vocals.
Celestial Blues feels like a deeply personal affair and a rich musical payoff for Esfandiari enduring what must have been a long, dark, night of the soul.
Musical therapy, as it were, and while a caustic experience, its also a healing one for artist and fan alike, an exquisitely crafted aural exorcism that offers much needed catharsis during these uncertain times.
