Album Review: Sun of the Dying - A Throne of Ashes
Reviewed by Eric Clifford
Nothing is heavier than regret. With whatever might is mine to wield I strain to push sand back up the hourglass, but not a grain among thousands will ever yield to my efforts. Some people claim to have none, and I half suspect there to be a lick of psychopathy in these people. Even for the most self assured of us, surely there are moments where it’s just them alone with their thoughts in the dead of night, running through each and every one of the most galling, cringeworthy events of their life? And that’s without touching on genuine regret either. Rudyard Kipling’s profound, crushing sense of guilt cursed him throughout the remainder of his life after he learned of his son dying in the first world war. It’s that regret I mean, that burdensome longing, that looking within one’s memories and begging them to be anything other than what they are. And it’s that I get from Sun of the Dying.
Those enamoured with the Peaceville Three’s early benisons will likely find much to wallow despondently in here. There’s pain in the melodies; pervasive, indelible, marrow-deep, immune to analgesics and perhaps bearing the sense that there is no desire for relief either. As if to grieve is a duty that would be shirked if ameliorated. You feel it, this yearning sadness bearing down upon the album like Atlas hoisting the globe aloft. Guitar or string lines as lavish as they are lachrymose thread a bloodied ache through the music on “Martyrs” “With Wings Aflame” and “Of Absence”, arching out, a vulture wingspan shrouding the album. The album feels cold, dew on tombstones, the dreary, grey absence of joy. The album thrives on the strength of it’s dynamics; always crestfallen but swapping between a quiescent reckoning with loss and raging against the vicissitudes of an unkind fate. God rolls his dice, and cares little where they fall. “House of Asterion” excels at this, unyielding stones and dampened wood piled into a funeral pyre conflagration of a string-lead finale.
Distraught as it may be, I too feel a shade of sadness at the album not being bereft of faults. The organ on “The Greatest of Winters” is not a choice I would have made, feeling too much like Emerson, Lake & Palmer trying to write a funeral doom record. It feels kooky, more pantomime than sincere drama. That’s on top of the way it opens with an isolated drum sprint that tricks you into thinking it will be fleet footed, only for it to slump into the slowest, doomiest pick of the bunch. It’s one thing to confound expectations, but in this case it only felt misplaced. Other songs suffer beneath their own imperfections too – I can’t tell if it’s an intentional pattern of muted ghost notes, or the scratch of changing fret fingerings, but either way it adds this jumpy syncopation to “Black Birds Beneath your Sky” that makes it feel as though the band got forced into a hoedown but were really miserable about it. Its blemishes like this that distract and diverge from the otherwise pervasive melancholy that the album paints for you. It's like being locked into the bottomless sorrow of weeping alongside the casket of your best beloved, only to find your tears punctuated by someone violently breaking wind in the distance.
It’s raining quite heavily where I live, and it feels more than merely coincidental that the skies opened when I started playing this album. It sags and staggers under the mass of its emotional import, spine bowed above a belly pushing a furrow into the soil below. I’ve heard it said that misery loves company. That being the case, I’d like you to join me and Sun of the Dying. As much as you may regret endless tranches of your spell alive, a purchase here is one decision at least that I doubt you’ll come to rue in days to come.
