Shout out to Kuma’s Corner, the best goddamn burger joint in the whole world, for first putting Lair of the Minotaur on my radar in the form of an outrageously delicious poached pear and brie cheeseburger.  Obviously, I should have heard of the Chicago death-doom project on their own merits, but such is the nature of the music game: inspiration comes to you from unlikely places sometimes.  And then, just as soon as they came into my life, they all but disappeared, save for a few scattered singles.  I Hail I is a statement, therefore, about how time has only served to make the band stronger.  

If you read our profile interview (and if you didn’t, get on that!) with frontman and mastermind Steven Rathbone, you’ll see he’s a man of few words, but endless wit, and that shines through in spades in all that Lair of the Minotaur does, but especially on I Hail I.  The wait since 2010’s Evil Power has been nigh insufferable, but the trust that Rathbone and company has cultivated in their fanbase has paid off, and it’s clear that Lair of the Minotaur weren’t resting on their laurels in the downtime.  After all, they run their own record label that released I Hail I, they all have day jobs and hobbies (custom action figures?  I gotta see what that looks like.) and they have side projects and other creative outlets to throw themselves into.  Still, there is only so much time you can spend outside of the maze before the beast pulls you back in, and so Rathbone and longtime drummer Chris Wozniak returned to the studio with friend, collaborator, engineer and now bassist Sanford Parker (Parker officially joined the band after recording I Hail I, and Rathbone actually played bass on the record) to cut ten blistering tracks of their infamous brand of hardcore tinged death doom.  It’s very clear that the flames of creativity were only fanned in the band’s absence; Josh described I Hail I as their best and heaviest album ever, and I would stand ten toes down on that statement.  At barely a half hour, I Hail I gets in and out with all the subtlety and nuance of a sledgehammer to the back of the skull, and that’s *including* an honest-to-god reinterpretation of Ethel Cain’s “Family Tree.”

“Emperor of Dis” opens the album with the kind of filthy, nasty crust punk anthem that immediately puts a smile on my face and a spring in my two-step.  The boys are, indeed, back in town, and right from the jump I Hail I makes its presence felt right in the pit of my guts.  This thing is all the flavors of heavy, aggressive and downright mean that I find myself craving as a palate cleanser after a couple of lighter and more high-minded albums I’ve reviewed.  I Hail I is about as meat-and-potatoes as it gets, and what it might lack in finesse, it makes up for by being outrageously, bone-crushingly heavy and full of the kind of ear-worm riffs that leave my neck sore and my body aching, made all the more impactful by Parker’s raw-but-not-too-raw production that keeps just enough grit on everything.  This album definitely leans harder into the “death” side of death-doom, but all in all there’s a pretty good variety of variations of heavy: there’s the stompy hardcore and crust, there’s plenty of razor sharp death metal, there’s plodding doom in the form of “Saturnus Reign” and the brutal closer “Tartarus Apocalypse,” there’s the aforementioned Ethel Cain song reimagined as pure black metal, and there’s even some synth doom on the all-too-short “Vulture Worship.”  I Hail I truly has it all, and it delivers the knockout punch fans of Lair of the Minotaur have been waiting a decade and a half for.

We here at Nine Circles LLC. have been clamoring for this album since it was announced, if you couldn’t tell, and now that it’s here, it is everything I (and Josh and everyone else) have been waiting for.  The minotaur’s escaped, and we’re all gonna get the horns, buddy.

— Ian

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I Hail I is available now on The Grind-House Records.  For more information on Lair of the Minotaur, visit their Instagram page.