De Occulta Philosophia was an excellent piece of Black Metal that provided an excellent atmosphere and imagery. I was looking forward to more of the same when Sun In The House... was released but what I got was so much more. I would first like to mention the cover art used. It’s a creepy piece by Zdzislaw Beksinski (Leviathan has also used some of his artwork) called Wolf Walker and I think it fits the sound of the album perfectly.
As soon as the first full length track starts the first thing you notice is the difference in production. This album has a much cleaner, better produced sound. Much better than any Hate Forest or Drudkh release. The next thing you will notice is the vocals. While De Occulta predominately used shamanic droning vocals, Sun In The House continues with the shamanic vocals but also uses a lot more of the harsh vocals reminiscent of Hate Forest. It makes for a much more varied listening experience and I think the inclusion of his vocal style from Hate Forest and Drudkh was a great move.
The album is overall a more aggressive black metal album than De Occulta was. Where De Occulta had instrumental interludes between most of the songs which gave it a more atmospheric style, this album just has an Intro and an Outro (which are longer than the instrumentals on De Occulta), which I much prefer to the many instrumentals on the previous album. I don’t think that many instrumental interludes wouldn’t have worked well on this album. The songs tend to get straight into the thick of things and that many breaks would have interrupted the excellent flow of the album. The better production on this album gives it a much richer sound (which is very welcome as the thick sound of the previous album made it hard to listen to sometimes) and the guitar and drum work is much more technical than the slightly repetitive and simplistic sound, very like Drudkh, they had on De Occulta. The drums are also much more predominant.
This is one of the best albums of 2010, and one of Roman Saenko’s best pieces of work to date. I hope the new Drudkh will take a lot of the improvements that Blood of Kingu have added to their music. It has an excellent production, rich sound and catchy riffs that aren’t repeated throughout the album. It ends with a really cool cover of Beherits Gate of Nanna. It’s not a song I ever enjoyed before listening to this cover but the inclusion of droning shamanic vocals to the song makes it much more enjoyable. I recommend this album to every fan of black metal as it is an excellent solid album with bags of replay value.
Score: 95%
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