Khemmis - Beneath The Scythe

Now this is what we call fresh music. The plastic of whichever physical medium you prefer will have hardly had time to cool from the pressing of Khemmis’ new album before this Rock Song of the Week pick makes it into your eager little ear tunnels, you lucky so-and-so. Do they even press CDs anymore? Their manufacture is a mystery to me, honestly. For a long time, I just assumed they appeared in HMV overnight, and the staff stuck labels on them once they’d manifested into reality. It would explain why nothing was ever in the right place.

But the secrets of the universe are less important than our Friday ritual, dear readers. Born out of Colorado and named for Khemmis, now Akkmim (or Panopolis, or Ipu, or Khent-min, in case we have any Ancient Greek or Ancient Egyptian readers with us today who aren’t up on their geography), our spotlight on the world of rock and metal lands on a doom-infused heavy metal treat this week. If you’ve never heard Khemmis before, then you might struggle to believe that this positively pulse-pounding output compared to their usual low and slow efforts is actually them on that description. But the band plays fast and loose with structure, genre, basically any word ending in -re to great effect, keeping things fresh while retaining that crushing doom undercurrent. It’s a little bit bloody good, to put it scientifically. 

But that’s just life, isn’t it? Try as anyone might, new eras bring new changes. Like the many names and phases of Akkmim, things cannot stay the same forever; it would be a lot less work having the same Rock Song of the Week pick every single week, but there’s no way anyone likes Purify by Metallica that much. For now, we leave you with Beneath The Scythe, hoping that it fills the hole in your heart that yearns for new, great music. If it doesn’t, we’ve got Purify by Metallica next week, so get your metronomes ready for that one.