LEX LEGION – Lex Legion

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8.0

• Bands:
  LEX LEGION
• Duration: 00:34:36
• Available from: 05/06/2026
• Label:

• MNRK Heavy

The announcement of the birth of Lex Legion was accompanied by a communication campaign which, basically, presented them as a new supergroup, with musicians from historical bands such as Motörhead, Scorpions, King Diamond and Pagan's Mind.
Formally everything is correct, but these high-sounding proclamations risk shifting the focus from what would really make the heartbeat of any classic metal fan accelerate. Lex Legion, in fact, are exactly the formation that gave life to two masterpieces such as “Them” and “Conspiracy”, together with His Majesty, King Diamond: we are therefore talking about Andy LaRocque and Pete Blakk on guitars, Hal Patino on bass, Mikkey Dee on drums, with the addition of Nils K. Rue of Pagan's Mind behind the microphone.
We realize how, when faced with a character with gigantic charisma like King Diamond, it is almost spontaneous to pour most of the attention on him, yet listening to “Lex Legion” immediately makes it clear how central the weight of his band was in defining King Diamond's sound.
Let's be clear, with this we don't mean that this is a King Diamond album without its protagonist: Lex Legion have their own personality, they have different objectives, an imaginary completely detached from that of the Danish singer's horror, yet over the entire album hovers like an evil specter that sinister and threatening atmosphere that has always made the fortune of the King's solo career.

“Lex Legion” is an essential album, which is just over half an hour. It doesn't get lost in useless frills and does exactly everything one would expect from a work born in these circumstances, that is, collecting the legacy of what these musicians did at the end of the Eighties and rereading it with the experience and maturity of those who, in the meantime, have never stopped and have acquired absolute mastery of their own language.
“Sleep Eternally” is the perfect business card and, not surprisingly, it was chosen as the first single: great melodies, work by the two guitars of absolute excellence and a rhythm section that would be the envy of anyone. Other standout pieces are, without a doubt, “Gypsy Tears”, in which the ghost of King Diamond becomes even more evident, also thanks to certain vocal solutions by Nils K. Rue that border on imitation; or “(I Am) The Resurrected”, the heaviest and most aggressive song of the lot, classic in form, but embellished with a modern sound in step with the times.
“Dreams Of Darkness” is also splendid, in which Andy LaRocque's typical phrasings embrace a Priestian riffing that reminded us of the assault of a “Rapid Fire”; while other episodes settle on more melodic and airy solutions, with an almost progressive edge that emerges above all in the lines chosen by Nils (“Lost Inside”).
After the excellent “Life Eternal”, driven by a still devastating Mikkey Dee, the album closes with a short instrumental, “Far Away”, in which electric and acoustic guitar intertwine in a melancholy and painful dialogue that brings to mind Metallica's “To Live Is To Die”.

To return to the consideration made at the beginning, Lex Legion, to our great satisfaction, do not at all seem like the classic supergroup built around a table to scrape together a few bucks from the fan bases of their respective members. Theirs seems like a solid project, perfectly capable of working both in the studio and live, where they could easily build a balanced show between unreleased material and great classics of the past.
While waiting for King Diamond to give birth to both his long-awaited return with Mercyful Fate and his new solo album, Lex Legion represent an unexpected but no less satisfying third way.