The Kings Will Be Ready is the début album of Hordes of Decay – and right from the beginning they go several lengths to show off their Black and Death Metal roots: By playing an intro one could mistake for the soundtrack of a B-Horror film. Peculiar, albeit effective.

After this unique start of the album the real music starts. Fairly fast tempo, hammering drums running like clockwork carrying the music forward while the guitars are almost completely drowned out by keyboards and the vocal track.
As you might imagine, all of this coupled together creates a very discordant whole. Very frustrating, especially since it does not do the lead singer justice.

The lead singers growls is almost textbook perfectly suited for his chosen genre: It is deep, menacing and vicious, much like you would expect a demon from the above-mentioned horror movie would sound like. Sadly,  the rest of the music cannot create a powerful enough ambience behind it and instead have the unfortunate result of cancelling each other out, which is a damn shame, given the potential this band has.
In their defence, however, blending old-school Black and Death Metal (as they obviously tried to do) is no easy task and one only Dissection (in this reviewers opinion at least) have managed to succesfully do.

To sum up this album: The lead singer has a lot of potential and could go out and create a lot of fantastic music provided that the band would stick with simpler riffs and fewer instruments dominating the majority of the tracks. Could they accomplish this, the music would not be nearly as chaotic and, by extent, far more pleasing to the eardrums.

Nevertheless, if you are into this genre, give it a listen.
If nothing else the lead singer is great.

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