Kingdom Come
Independent

THE REVIEW

The group Kingdom Come is the artistic expression of a singer, guitarist, and composer from Hamburg named Lenny Wolf, who is now fifty-one years old. The thirteen albums released under this name can be structured into three phases. The first of these, encompassing the first three works from 1988 to 1991, is the "American" phase: Lenny is in Los Angeles, playing, recording, and performing with American musicians.

The second phase spans from the fourth album "Bad Image" of 1993 to the eighth "Too" at the end of the millennium: he ended the American adventure, returned to Germany, and collaborated with local musicians, insisting on the same style and musical genre, namely British-style hard rock (with Led Zeppelin and AC/DC as the most evident references).

The last phase of his career, still ongoing and inaugurated precisely by this 2002 album, sees good old Lenny still and always in his own country, intent on producing music almost alone, delegating just the guitar solos (few and short, anyway) to others, and perhaps getting a helping hand from colleagues experienced in programming drums and other sampled and synthesized sounds. The musical genre has indeed at this point shifted toward industrial and blends scores executed by guitars and other traditional instruments with invasive electronic sounds and samples.

The result is always excellent: Wolf is a musician with chops, with no lack of melodic and harmonic sense, a Germanic rigor and capacity for synthesis in creating atmospheres and injecting power with a few touches of the main instruments (bass, guitar, and drums) and the supporting electronics. His voice is distinctive, not easy to digest due to a tendency toward the supplicating and plaintive, his dramatic and imploring vibrato can result in cloying... like a less hippy and more brooding Robert Plant, let's say.

The story of this musician is similar to that of many others in the rock and metal sectors: a glorious start to his career in the golden phase of the late eighties, with the first albums well supported by the major record company and selling hugely, followed by a rapid scaling down due to the explosion of the grunge genre and the subsequent closure of funding by record companies to performers of "classic" rock. Finally, the last more underground phase, forced by the deep crisis of the music industry but at the same time favored by the development of Personal Computers and the accessibility, through them, to the quality of professional recording once the exclusive domain of well-equipped and costly studios.

Lenny probably isn’t a nice guy... no known photos of him smiling relaxedly, he's definitely a damn perfectionist, the kind who isn’t satisfied with anything and criticizes everything, especially coming from unfortunate collaborators. His career somehow demonstrates this: the first album by Kingdom Come sold millions of records... this one and all the others released in the new millennium are known only in Germany. Here in Italy, the memory of his exploits is extremely faint, this group is cited mainly for the insults it received at the start of its career, as a vile clone of Led Zeppelin.

It’s not fair, I feel Wolf has produced thirteen albums of great hard rock, freeing himself from the substantial initial derivations and focusing on his own style. Personally, I’m crazy about this brooding German... I perceive his rare talent in bringing out, with a few strokes of rhythmic guitar with always superbly chosen tone, with a drum train typically a'la John Bonham cadenced and overpowering, with Austro-Hungarian drastically effective chord changes, with dramatic and evocative electronic inserts, the sublime essence of melodic and tough rock. His austere, rational but passionate synthesis of the ingredients that make this genre great reaches me with strength and admirable evidence.

Listen to the fourth track "Didn't Understand" to grasp Lenny’s mastery with arrangement and production: when, on the electronic loop of the prologue, the rhythmic guitars come in with a beastly dynamic, you literally jump out of your chair. For him, even two well-treated acoustic guitar chords are enough (listen to the attack of the immediately following "Forever") to create immediate tension and musicality. Hooray for Germany, land of conquest for classic rock and of sincere attachment and devotion to its masters (English and American), as well as for its worthy disciples like Mr. Wolf.