I was a big fan of the last album from Slovakian dark industrial/chamber-doom outfit Phragments, Earth Shall Not Cover Their Blood. That disc and its monstrous blend of rumbling orchestral strings, malevolent vocals, pummeling tribal rhythms and Lustmordian blackness is still one of my favorite releases on Malignant. New Kings is the long awaited follow-up to that 2008 album, but this time around the duo have stripped their sound down to something much more minimal and spacious, with all of the activity and energy of their previous work replaced by vast expanses of sonic emptiness, endless vistas of slate-grey sky and smog-draped, black-limned skylines. This new stuff obviously takes a page out of the Lustmord book, but Phragments craft such immense, dramatic driftscapes that it hardly matters. Compared to most other dark ambient albums, this one virtually zips by; almost all of the tracks clock in at five minutes or less, which permits the album to constantly shift it's sound, moving slowly from one black thunderhead of low-end rumble and metallic reverberations to the next, with long stretches of distant orchestral thrum shuddering beneath the sudden appearance of loud, metallic blasts or sudden surges upward into gorgeous, angelic drone. Never gets too pretty though, and never for too long. The omnipresent layer of soot and frost that coats this album soon settles back down, a patina of dead grey ash, and those speaker-rattling subterranean reverberations are always just over the horizon, spelling doom, doom, doom. All of that gorgeous, grim orchestral drift from Earth is still there, whole whirling clouds of it, but torn from the band's percussive elements, it blossoms into something so much more vast and awesome. This album of entropic low-frequency hymns has shot right to the top of my list of favorite dark ambient albums for this year. This is an album that was just made for listening while staring up into the stars late at night. Highly recommended.

Beautifully packaged, too, the disc housed inside of an oversized fold-out eight-panel cardstock jacket, and issued in a limited edition of five hundred copies.