As a collaboration between two artists who are almost impossible to pin down by genre conventions, A Throne Without A King is at times a difficult album, often not resembling anything from either artist, but a different beast entirely. It may be difficult, but its worth the effort to fully absorb what’s there to be heard.
While the bulk of this album is the four part title track, each of the two artists contribute their own solo pieces (on the 7" if it's the vinyl version).Pyramids' "Phaedra's Love" is full of jarring transitions, often paring lush, gorgeous melodic textures with caustic industrial pounding and erratic, rapid-fire drum machine beats.The balance of beauty and ugly is carefully struck, and it makes for an unsettling song.
Jenks Miller's Horseback provides "Thee Cult of Henry Flynt" which, other than the occasional guttural vocal outburst, isn't as metal as I've come to expect: in some ways the melodic work feels like a throwback to Impale Golden Horn.While that album was more about mood, here the rather pleasant guitar playing is layered and pushed along by a rapid beat.However, the second half sounds like the first being pulled apart, with fragments of voices and disembodied guitar melodies drifting through space.
The four part "A Throne Without A King" strips away the more musical elements of both artists to create a textural 45+ minute composition that focuses less on melody and more on odd, unrecognizable sounds.The first piece is mostly backward chimes and glitchy outbursts, with a bit of concession to gentle melody in its latter moments, but broken up by weirdly processed voices.
Into the second piece there are a lot of static-laden layers of sound that become thicker and denser as it goes on.It never becomes full on noise or overly harsh, but it definitely makes its presence known.The dissonance retreats to allow in oddly treated vocals, but then launches into full on Merzbow mode to close the track.
The penultimate segment begins with the noise from before, but slowly reins it in, leaving the focus on buried droning tones that are ever so slightly melodic, but not in any conventional sense.It comes to a close (and leads into the final track) with abstract, clattering percussion that sets up the conclusion.The final piece is a fitting conclusion, mixing textural static with bleak, reverberating tones and bizarre percussive crashes.
For some reason I can't fully articulate, the collaboration reminded me of a further abstraction of the more "out there" jazz, along the lines of Albert Ayler and Ornette Coleman (circa Free Jazz), but without any traditional instrumentation.It has that same inertia to it, a sense of disciplined propulsion that underlies the chaos, making sense of the madness, but only after careful absorption and decoding.While I probably favored each artist’s solo contributions for regular listening, the collaboration is a dense, puzzling work that takes a few spins to fully unravel its secrets.
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