Sometimes over the course of a lengthy tenure in being completely absorbed in music in some fashion, certain bands and musicians can fade in and out of a regular rotation of what you are listening to at the time; Damnation AD has for some reason been one of those bands for me and through no reason because their music is so much what I can get behind (though their production has been a bit spotty over the course of the recordings and some of their best songs have gotten hindered by such a fate), but one aspect of this band is certain and that is the devastating tenor of their music is evident regardless of how you might feel while listening to their records.
Kingdom Of Lost Souls might be the finest recorded hour (or so) from Damnation AD due in part to it possibly having their best production values from their initial run (they reunited several years later resulting in the album In This Life Or The Next) while also due to the band having matured over the years as a band bringing together some of their most cohesive material and most impassioned performances all at the same time, and yet saying that Kingdom Of Lost Souls is impassioned sounds funny because the band seems to come from an extremely dark place; take the title track (“You want to know what it’s like on the other side”) fits the music perfectly and places the album firmly from a sense of depression or at least heavily empathizing with such feelings or listen to “Turn Into Ghosts” and try telling me that the song does not feel like a tank barreling down some city street demolishing all in its path (fitting considering the album cover), but the whole album just never lets up from its punishing low end rumble and nasty riffs while songs like “The Mortal” may pick up the pace from time to time to prevent everything from sounding so singularly staid.
Damnation AD certainly delivers the goods with this album mixing hardcore with some Sabbath style metal with getting hung with that horrid "sludge” tag, and maybe that is due to the vocal style that obviously comes right out of the hardcore scene rather than any metal vocalist, but I would think it has to do with the band not falling onto some of the more clichéd sounds from that sub-genre; in any case, Kingdom Of Lost Souls is easily one of the heaviest records to come from Revelation and one of their least like others on the label as well making it in part another of their more underrated albums.
