Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10
You can have as many one sided chats with the almighty as you want but in the end, as many have found to their cost throughout the centuries, She might not or cannot be bothered, to answer back. You only have to look at some of the real hardships faced in the world, the displacement, the cities sacrificed and those with too many loose morals with the fingers on the cull switch to understand that having a conversation with god is about as useful as striking up a discussion with Death.
La Petite Mort Or A Conversation With God, there are many who would suggest it is the same thing, that the coin is double headed and that humanity’s actions have come to a head. It is the intersection where each choice is littered with the destitute and the shelved, from the war torn and emigrants of places such as Syria to the American home grown who are forgotten by their own Government, the people of Detroit who have suffered under the weight of bankruptcy, to the crowds of Flint who feel the shift in the priorities and who see gun law as the next natural evolution; the curtain is coming down on it all as Death and God are arguably revealed to wear the same designer clothes.
King 810 take that premise and follow up their hugely impressive 2014 debut Memoirs Of A Murderer with the extraordinary La Petite Mort Or A Conversation With God and it is one that strikes fear and moving concern into the listener’s heart.
The despair, the anger and the freedom to realise just how far down the road America has travelled in its own angst, its tearing apart of the Founding Father’s assertion of the pursuit of happiness, life and liberty, is such that you cannot help but feel for the narrator of the songs but also feel pity for all that the country has conveniently allowed to slide under the table, the native American people, Black, White, the Hispanics and every creed and colour in between; when the Narrator, the irreplaceable David Gunn, talks about the loss and the desire that is innate in all that have been ignored, you have to listen carefully and without preconception.
In tracks such as Alpha & Omega, Black Swan, the fantastic, edgy and disturbing The Trauma Model, Me & Maxine and Le petite Mort, conversation is not what it is about, this is a set of songs with demands, the insistence of a billion people that they be heard and that something should be done to redress the balance that ignorance has inflicted upon their world.
La Petite Mort Or A Conversation With God is humbling, disturbing, unsettling to the point of knowing how much it will be of a concern to some in ties and large greedy bank balances, this is the Narrator admonishing both God and her lover Death and it couldn’t be more fascinating a listen.
Ian D. Hall