Iron Thrones - The Wretched Sun

(Self-released, 2010)

Reviewed by Scott.

http://www.myspace.com/ironthrones

I first read about Iron Thrones on the invaluable MetalSucks blog, where they were compared to Opeth. Or, what Opeth might sound like if they emerged out of today’s metal scene, and not the Swedish melodic death metal scene from two decades ago. I’m a big fan of Opeth, so this caught my attention, and I picked up the Iron Thrones album The Wretched Sun. Amazingly, these guys weren’t signed when this album was released, and from what I can tell, still aren’t -- which is sort of insane, considering how good they are. (Although maybe they’ve chosen to self-release their stuff, which makes some sense in this day and age.)

Anyway, Iron Thrones plays a kind of melodic, technically ambitious death metal that does sound a lot like Opeth. They mix complex and often totally crushing riffs with the occasional quiet, jazz-inflected passage, although without much of the folky/acoustic stuff that Opeth is known for. You can hear the similarities in the way the riffs are constructed and threaded together into full songs, and how the songs come together to form a complete, fluid album. Like Opeth, these guys are very melodic, but they don’t rely on excessive guitar leads or harmonies or layers of cheesy keyboards (thank god), and they temper the melody with riffs that settle into heavy grooves or break into quick little shreds that make you go, aw fuck, that was cool. There are many such moments on this album, when you experience the most basic of metal pleasures: you smile and say, that was a cool fucking riff.

But Iron Thrones deserves to be judged on their own merits, and not just as a band that sort of sounds like another really great band. They have their own sound, and it works so well, I think, for two key reasons. One is that they’re tasteful. The Wretched Sun has a high standard of musicianship but it never sounds like a bunch of dudes jerking off, like a lot of technical metal often does -- they play some impressive shit but always in the service of the song, and not as an end in itself. They also take elements from all over the metal world but blend them together into a coherent whole, which never comes off sounding eclectic. That’s cool for some bands, but here the diversity of influences is more subtle, and submerged in the total aesthetic of the album. The other reason is the quality of the songwriting. The songs are complex but they move along naturally -- I usually hate this phrase in music but the songs feel organic, and not just like an assemblage of cool riffs linked together with no sense of overall development or motion. No riff salad here. Instead, you have a fluid progression from one part of a song to the next, even when it’s intended to be a little abrupt or jarring, like from a clean, mellow section into some fuck-all heaviness.

So The Wretched Sun is pleasingly consistent and consistently pleasing, is what I mean. If there’s a downside to this, it’s that the band doesn’t take very many chances, and there isn’t much experimentation. They change shit up in a few sections -- two (I think) instances of clean vocals, which work well but are brief, and some whispering stuff during a clean part, but that’s about it. The album never gets boring, though, so this isn’t really a problem -- but we’ll see what happens on albums down the road (and hopefully, there will be many!).

Just a brief note on the lyrics: the harsh vocals are fairly intelligible, so you can follow along if you want to. This seems like a loose concept album about love, and losing it -- the first song, “Like A Moth to A Flame” is basically a love song, but there’s some foreboding here: “You left me without words / Tongue tied in a knot of anxiety / I knew I needed you / The blinding beauty I see in your eyes / The first embrace / The warmth of your skin / Desire deceived / Like a moth to flame.” We’ve all been there right? And we all know how the whole moth/flame thing ends up: you get fucking burned! Hence, by the end of the album, in the song “And the Sky Came Falling Down” (before a killer guitar solo outro): “This pile of ashes no longer reflects / the radiance of the flames that we once created / Instead it lies there as a reminder of hollow words / and hollow years that I never desired to see.” So it all goes to shit. The rest of the lyrics are more or less like these, and they work for the music but don’t really add too much -- they’re inoffensive, occasionally sensitive (not in a bad way) reflections on a doomed relationship. They don’t distract from the instrumentation, which is where the real power of this band is anyway.

And fuck, that’s some power. I liked The Wretched Sun the first time I heard it, but it grew on me after a few listens. Not that the album isn’t accessible (it is, if you’re into this sort of thing to begin with), but you really come to appreciate the balance and the quality of the songwriting once you become familiar with the songs. I just ordered their older album, Visions of Light (which I’ve yet to hear), and am looking forward to it, but am more excited to see what these guys come up with in the future.