King Woman – Celestial Blues Review

King Woman hit the metal world in 2017 with debut album Created In the Image of Suffering to relatively high praise, both from metal sites and the Pitchfork/NPR corners of metal coverage. At the time I even saw it on a few of the more mainstream metal site year end lists. Personally, I found it…pretty OK. You all know me to be a shill for sludgy doom who doesn’t mind the stoner/psych side of things, and that was squarely what Created In the Image of Suffering was, albeit with a slightly more indie enchantress spin thanks to principle member Kristina Esfandiari. While the Iranian born, California raised Esfandiari certainly has a distinctly captivating voice, I found the first King Woman album solid, but falling short of the hype. Four long years later, Esfandiari now resides in New York, and with a more fleshed out band in tow she unloads sophomore full length Celestial Blues into the doom metal landscape. Was it worth the wait? 

My first impression of Celestial Blues was that despite the familiarity of Esfandiari’s low, husky croon, the psych-y stoner doom of the debut has evolved. This is still doom metal, and a bit sludgy, but there are more clean passages as well as more explosive moments. Songs like “Boghz” trade in stoner groove for an angular post metal sound, while “Coil” and “Psychic Wound” find the band cutting loose with harsher vocals and more propulsive drumming by Joey Raygoza. “Morning Star” and “Golgotha” double down on a kind of metal-adjacent indie occult rock a la Chelsea Wolfe, while the whole album’s slightly 90s feel calls to mind last year’s excellent Thou/Emma Ruth Rundle collaboration. Tying all the new musical directions together under her considerable command is Esfandiari, who possesses a range of character and technique that other breathy lady doomsters routinely fail to achieve, from the ghostly, almost whistling “oooh” of the opening title track to the harsh vocals that hew more closely to punk rock shouts than metal growls littered throughout the album

King Woman‘s growth from debut to now is best understood when considering the way disparate influences have been synthesized into a fully integrated sound on Celestial Blues. The big, post metal build ups of “Boghz” and standout “Ruse” sit neatly between heavy psych dirges like “Psychic Wound” and the gentle, barely whispered coda of “Paradise Lost.” “Morning Star,” a retelling of Lucifer’s fall from his perspective, is a fascinating mix of languid indie rock and ritualistic doom. I can’t stop imagining a Neko Case cover of the song as it would fit her aesthetic so beautifully, and it strongly reminds me of her Fox Confessor Brings the Flood confession that “It’s the Devil I love.” While Esfandiari’s vocals are the main event here, don’t overlook how the songwriting highlights the just-minimal-enough guitar work of Colin Gallagher. His ability to underpin and entwine with the vocals, knowing when to pull back into gentle, echoey strums and when to blast forward with a big riff, contribute to the album’s success in ways that might not be immediately noticeable. 

One of the strikes against Created In the Image of Suffering was a tendency to rely on highly repetitive passages and Esfandiari’s voice to create an hypnotic effect over dynamic songwriting. That has been partly corrected here, although it does persist. Most noticeably, “Golgotha” overplays the repetition hand in a way that obscures some of the more interesting textures, like the violin, that it brings to the album as a whole. This (relative) low point is followed by the hard charging “Coil,” which, while an instance of Celestial Blues bringing a new level of aggression to King Woman‘s sound, is a song that doesn’t do much when removed from the context of the album. Thankfully, these hiccups are easy to overlook, since the rest of the material moves from strength to strength and shows a band coming into their own after little more than an EP and a full-length to their name. 

Celestial Blues sounds, to these ears, like a delivery on the promise shown on the band’s debut. There is more space between instruments and ideas, and Kristina Esfandiari inhabits it fully. Fans of Chelsea Wolfe and Darkher will want to pay particular note, but this is far from derivative. King Woman bring a unique voice and perspective to the fertile ground in the gray space between metal and independent post rock.

Rating: 3.5/5.0
DR: 6 | Format Reviewed: 320 kbps mp3
Label: Relapse Records
Websites: kingwoman.bandcamp.com | facebook.com/KNGWMN
Releases Worldwide: July 30th, 2021