The Crown
The Burning

It was 1995, and 5 Swedish boys, just over the age of majority, after a few demos, made their entrance into the market with this album, where the original version featured the name The Crown Of Thorns. This name had to be changed to The Crown due to another already established AoR band with the same name. I own the album in the reissued version with The Crown on the cover.

This album marks the beginning of a career that, after 13 years, ended in 2004 mainly due to the lack of professionalism of the organizers of the various tours for the promotion of the six albums of this cult band in Scandinavia, but known and appreciated also in the rest of the worldwide extreme metal underground.
The sound in this work leans more towards death/thrash metal with slight black influences rather than the death/thrash we were accustomed to from Hell is Here (third album and one of the best in their discography) onwards.
The track The Lord Of The Rings is very special, as Lindstrand’s growling, demonic voice "recites" a passage from the famous book where it talks about the creation of the rings of power; it’s a death outburst at insane speeds and rightfully belongs to the best in the album, as does the subsequent I Crowl (one of the band's manifestos) which starts with a guitar section hinting at a more moderate song and then, just a minute in, explodes into a death/thrash track of rare beauty and compositional imagination, here the listener is paralyzed by the fury and energy dispensed by the quintet. Another prominent track is Forever Heaven Gone (also one of the band’s classics) which elevates the technical and stylistic level of the album even more by showing the band’s melodic/death side. Yet another formidable death/trash track is Earthborn which starts almost melodically but then bursts into the more classic death/thrash for the band; it might be the best composition of the entire album, even though overall it is the “slowest” of the 11. I could go on describing the other tracks, but the concept remains unchanged: speed, ferocity, growl singing, head-crushing drumming; in three words, unlimited metal assault.
The album is a real punch in the stomach (or face, if you prefer) and marks the beginning of a career filled with incredibly violent death/thrash tracks and albums capable of bringing to light a not necessarily new style but one that effectively conceals the influences of other past bands with fresh and inspired songwriting.

Strongly recommended to fans of breathtaking extreme death/thrash, but not recommended for those who do not enjoy savage and brutal tracks at 200 km/h with a voice that seems to belong to an orc from The Lord of the Rings.