King Diamond: Give Me A Break... Please

If you've paid any attention to the news over the last decade-plus, you'll be familiar with the concept of distraction as strategy. When you have not lived up to your promises, you throw out anything you can to distract people before they reach their breaking point. People engage in that behavior because it works, as our attention spans have become too short to hold a grudge any longer. Case in point; look at how many 'canceled' celebrities have managed to come back into prominence without actually having a moral reckoning.

We are getting one of those moments right now from King Diamond. It was recently announced that guitarist Andy La Rocque has left the band after forty years, being replaced by Gus G. A lineup change on its own would not be a big deal, except for the fact that King Diamond notes he and Gus have been working on a cache of new material. Um... what about that album that has supposedly been close to done for years now?

Something smells fishy here.

Let's think about this for a moment. If the album was in any stage of completion, Gus would not be in a position to contribute much if anything to it. King writes concept albums, so the songs have to not just exist, but be structured and ordered in a way that fits the narrative of the album. To throw in a random Gus riff, or song, would be to destroy the flow of what has been written merely to include the new guy.

Unless... the album has never been close to being finished, and King Diamond has been lying to us for years.

When the first promise came and went, a delay was understandable. But when those delays went on year after year after year, it became harder to see it as an honest run of bad luck. The final straw came, I believe, when La Rocque put out a record with his side project Lex Legion just a bit ago. That record felt and sounded enough like a King Diamond album, and came together quickly enough, that it was a slap in the face of King Diamond not being able to put an album together over all these years.

That record laid bare the delay was entirely on King himself, as the band was ready and able to put together music at any moment. In response, not only is La Rocque no longer in the band, but King is giving the impression an entirely new album is going to be put together without him. None of this makes sense, does it?

Unless, as I said, we revert to the reason I'm talking about this at all today; honesty.

Musicians owe us nothing, except for honesty. They can make whatever music they want on whatever timeline they want, so long as they aren't conning us. I know the creative process can be slow, or there might not be inspiration at all anymore. If it takes longer to make an album, that's fine. If there aren't going to be more albums, and you tell people, that's fine too. I have plenty of respect for Billy Joel saying his heart wasn't in it anymore, and not making another album to this day.

Where I lose respect for people is when they lie to us. Plenty of bands have lied to us about retiring, only to come back, and it pisses me off. Motley Crue made such a show of their retirement that I can't believe how quickly people were willing to forgive them so they could see Vince Neil sucking oxygen as hard as his voice sucks these days. Candlemass announced they were never going to make another record, only to come back as soon as the other projects never took off in a way that would make money.

This announcement, and the implication it has been in the works for a while if King and Gus already have a batch of material in the works, feels like King has been lying to us, and he's trying to distract us from that fact. Now that the lineup has changed, and he has to write a different album, we'll excuse another five years of delaying. We're going to forget just how long it's been that he has failed to deliver on his promises. That's the key to this whole thing.

Enough time has passed that any album King Diamond releases has the "Chinese Democracy" problem of not being able to justify the amount of time it took to make. The simplest answer to that issue is to never release an album. Voila! As I said, if King Diamond had said he wasn't interested in making a new album, we would have understood. Plenty of other bands are out there as touring nostalgia acts, and there's not really any shame in it. The difference is that those bands aren't pretending to be something else. KISS made it clear in their last years they had no interest to make another record, nor any need to. If KISS can be honest, the people who grift their fans out of more money than any other band in history, how the hell can King Diamond not be?

Whether any new music actually comes of this pairing is something I'm not going to hold my breath waiting for. To take my own advice and be honest, I don't care if there ever is a new song or album. I've been writing about music for fourteen years, and King Diamond's last album came out five years before I started. "Give Me Your Soul... Please" is a legal adult at this point, so forgive me if I've passed the point of giving a single, solitary fuck about this.

The only reason I'm talking about this at all is because I'm sick to death of King Diamond being in the music news when there's nothing newsworthy about it.

King Diamond, give me a break... please.