Tau Cross premiered a new properly seizure-inducing music video on Youtube this week to promote their upcoming second album, Pillar of Fire, which comes out July 21st on Relapse Records . “Killing the King” shows the group’s anti-authoritarian bent which Relapse is trying to turn political to appeal to their scenester sludge rock and metalcore audience’s hatred of everything Donald Trump despite the band’s obvious intent and medievalisms in the published lyrics.

Lyrics:

Silence, upon the land

As winter eats into the soul

No fire, within the hall

To cleanse this land of wickedness and blood Crow calls within the wood

On black sands, the plague ships burn

As for the law, what law there is has failed

Your savior is never to come There’s a man in the sky for the faithful

There’s a face in the moon for the child

But we are the knights of the wasteland

In a mad world we’re for killing the king The evil, the arrogant

Have risen, upon the piled up bodies of our dead

And the stones crack and the mountains crumble down into the sea

And who will stand with me There’s a law of the land to condemn us

And the law of the just makes us strong

For we are the knights of the wasteland

And justice is burning, we’re killing the king Those who would divide and conquer

Our scaffold shall greet them well

The oak of our fathers take the task

The fall to Hell Rise up in the Eastland, Arise! In the north

For we are the knights of the wasteland

And when a dark sun rises

We’re killing the king

As is plainly obvious, “Killing the King” is an apolitical anti-authoritarian celebration of the power of bringing order through entropy and destruction that is part of the traditional spirit of metal. The lyrics are steeped in medieval mysticism and tell of the grisly fall of a traditional society, making reference to both Arthurian legend and the violent end of the Middle Ages.

The European population had been slowly increasing since the fall of the Roman Empire due to new agricultural technology and techniques despite the lawlessness and constant low-level conflict. When the Medieval Warm Period ended at the end of the 13th century causing crop yields declined, a one-two punch of mass famine and the Black Death halved the population, plunging the continent into a frenzy of warfare and rebellion that destroyed the feudal culture and society of western Europe. Usually the divinely-ordained monarch supposed-in charge, whose dynasty was handed a crown by the fist of God coming out of the sky, met a morbid end.

King Arthur himself went out this way when Camelot became a grey-skied, barren wasteland. This weather phenomena was corroborated by the contemporary Procopius who noted how the sun resembled an eclipse, a serious portend in almost all pre-modern cultures. As you probably know, Arthur supposedly sought the Grail to heal the land from whatever cosmic ill or human sin robbed his kingdom of fecundity but his nephew/son Mordred rebelled with many of Arthur’s knights and they both perished at the Battle of Camlann in 537. This is the mythological source behind T.S. Elliot’s The Waste Land, which Rob “The Baron” Miller (Amebix) has referenced in the promotional material for the album, which is especially pertinent to the present when the third world is about to subject itself to a Malthusian holocaust.

“Killing the King” is a big improvement over “Deep State”, the first preview track from Pillar of Fire. The track sounds like Killing Joke, if instead of selling out in the mid eighties, they spent all of 1986 entranced by Metallica‘s Master of Puppets and decided to write heavy metal directly inspired by Metallica’s last hurrah. Hopefully the rest of the compositions on Pillar of Fire take after this and not the Sonic Mass type radio rock pandering heard on “Deep State”.

Tags: arthurian legend, crust, Heavy Metal, king arthur, lyrics, mainstream metal, Medieval, medieval metal, medievalism, Middle Ages, music video, new track, Post-Punk, procopius, relapse, relapse records, rob miller, Speed Metal, t.s. elliot, tau cross, upcoming album, upcoming release