Album Review: Throne - That Who Sat Upon Him, Was Death
Reviewed by Eric Clifford
Throne present me with a conundrum. A veritable brainteaser, if you will. That’s because my initial impression of Throne's latest was not a positive one, and while it has grown on me over repeat listens, that’s mostly owed to a couple of songs and sporadic flashes of something finer dotted hither and thither like caviar on a turd. The distaste lingers as though implanted, ground to a keen edge against the dull whetstone of overwhelming boredom. And it’s not altogether easy to explain why – on paper, Throne should float every boat I’ve ever laid eyes on. They bill themselves as a blackened death affair, yet they’re much more on the “death” side of that equation, more aligned with someone like Inveracity than Darkthrone. Maybe you like Inveracity, or any other of Suffocation’s malign brood. I know I do. But if you’ve heard Inveracity, or Regurgitation, or any of a thousandfold more Suffo-spawn, then you’ve heard this album before. I feel that I should like it, and I feel bad that I don’t.
That it’s entirely too reliant on the rudiments of it’s genre is true to the point of bleach-swilling tedium. I’m not certain at what point the endless ad nauseum repetition of 1-bar 16th note chromatic runs becomes too many, but Throne swan-dive willy first through it and keep sprinting ‘til they reach Alaska. It’s clear from the opening track – at 1.25, there it is, a basic descending chromatic pattern that you’re going to hear roughly a thousand times before the album is done. The problem isn’t alleviated by their obsession with monotonous slam riffs either – “Blasphemous Perversion” is riddled with both these issues like head lice, just one planck-length section adjoining another. It’s less than 3 minutes long but I’d swear my beard got greyer listening to it. It’s as though the band thought of a few ludicrously awesome riffs per song then realised they had to build the rest of the track and only had filler to work with thereafter. It’s not necessarily an utterly ruinous proposition to stick to the basics, but even so Throne really are spreading a very shallow bag of tricks very thin for long stretches of the runtime here. The album wears quickly, with so many short phrases cycling endlessly that it feels almost haphazard at times. Songs don’t feel altogether fleshed out, their component parts embryonic and unformed. Sections of tracks wind up being spitting images of one another, let alone the similarities to other band’s output.
Stronger cuts lurk near the tail end of the album; “Upon Deathless Winds” benefits from some more complex riff construction and blackened stylings to deliver what is by light years the best cut of the bunch. I could sing similar praises of “Where Angels Cower in Fear” which leans towards a lightspeed melodeath approach, catapulting black clouds of toxic arrows to lodge quivering in your skin. They demonstrate the potential firepower that Throne could bring to bear, but as it is they instead share space with “Realm of Immolation” and it’s soporific chugging. The annoying bit is that nothing here is a total loss – there will always be one or two triumphant avataric passages of unbridled deathly majesty dotted here or there, bolstered by the dirty, virulent production job that crunches like bitten cartilage. There’s potential in abundance, desperately clinging to driftwood in a limitless yet tepid sea of apathy induction. One thing I am unambiguously enamoured with however is the speed the album goes at; in tempo terms it sticks a brick on the accelerator and commences doing lines off the dashboard. A poppy snare drum fires off like a light machine gun crew attacked by bees. For all the misgivings I may have towards the songwriting, these guys are inarguably playing their asses off.
Solos shred with all the raw controlled chaos of the inaugural Deicide release and the bass has the rotund sway of hippopotamus buttocks. Describing it aloud makes it sound like something I would be in thrall to, so much so that I keep listening and relistening, waiting for the surely inevitable moment that it will just “click”.
But it never did.
There is exemplary stuff contained here. It sits mixed with a surfeit of average placeholder material that weighs it down beyond its capacity to resurface. For every moment that engages, two more repel, and the final result is a disappointment magnified by the realisation that much better lies within Throne’s reach, if only they could grasp it.
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