Dienstag, 28. Februar 2017

rings of saturn - lugal ki en

the tunes from "lugal ki en" were the first from rings of saturn i enjoyed all aspects of. the production, the aesthetics and, of course, the music itself. i listened to a youtube stream of the record and it quickly became clear that i wanted their stuff on vinyl. as i already said in my last post, i was happy to find a german distro, hhv.de namely, to have a copy in stock. i ordered immediately which seems like to have been the right decision. apparantly hhv had only one copy left as they have sold out on it by now.
the first thing that struck me when i opened the package and pulled the record out was the insane artwork by mark cooper/mind rape art. it is so colourful and rich in detail that i can't get my eyes off of it. it matches the band's weird alien metal concept right to the point. somehow rings of saturn bring a certain depth into their lyrical theme so their stuff is still clearly self-ironic but never cheesy. the second thing that caught my interest was the album title.
wikipedia told me the following: "lugal ki en" translates from ancient sumerian cuneiform and means "king of the earthlings, lord of the cosmic world". i have no clue if that is true but if so, it is pretty damn cool. when you look at the title on the front, you can see the sumerian cuneiform behind the letters of "lugal ki en". musically this is modern tech death metal at its best. fast, crushing, melodic and with loads of quirky ideas that makes them really unique. check it out.
when i ordered i didn't know what colour my copy would be on. i hoped for the latest re-press on orange/purple merge with splatter. as you can see i got something different. it happened to be a first press on opaque purple vinyl. it may not look as extravagant as the other colour-ways but i still like it and the current international shipping rates definitely keep me from ordering a different colour from overseas. 400 copies made in gatefold sleeve with insert. unique leader records. 2014.