If you thought Pyramids' rapid-fire style-hopping, from trad doom metal crunch to post-rock's technical ecstasy, was exhausting on their 2008 debut album, then prepare yourself for an almost hour-long collage that makes their old stuff seem downright uniform. If you enjoyed the gnarled oomph of Horseback's take on bottom-heavy black metal, then get ready to hear that heaviness reduced to the merest eerie echo floating through that collage. Yet while their solo releases could frustrate via skill-without-conviction, or feel like retreads of well-worn metal sounds, these two bands seem newly invigorated by working together, and the collaborative A Throne Without a King takes a real chance, risks real failure, and goes further out than either group has on its own. While so much avant metal fails to truly scramble the genre's rules, often offering little more than weakened takes on metal's essentials, Pyramids and Horseback have jointed forces here to create a stylistic mutant.
A Throne Without a King will probably repulse the folks out there sporting Repulsion tattoos. It will also probably puzzle those who prefer their black and/or doom metal with a comforting glaze of My Bloody Valentine-style melody. That's a shame, but it's hardly surprising. True, there are few moments of hardcore riffage and burning-at-the-stake screams. And there are moments of swirling beauty that could have easily been lifted off a shoegaze (or even early IDM) record. But rather than simply smushing two sorta-complementary genres together, Throne explores extremes of abrasive and soft, oblique structure and seeming formlessness, rather than simply recycling elements from the-genre-known-as-extreme-music. A long-form collage of feedback and fractured electronics, where the wary won't be asking "is this metal?" so much as "what is this?" If that kind of exploratory amorphousness, with a side of blackened ugliness, sounds appealing, you probably already know if you need this. In one of our rapidly disappearing brick-and-mortar record stores, the sticker might read: "Recommended if you like dark ambient, old-school academic tape edits, horror movie sound design, the fringes of improv electronics scene, etc."
Though the main attraction is clearly the album's titular four-part epic, which sprawls for close to an hour, Throne opens with two relatively short and palate-readying tracks, a solo outing from each band. Ostensibly this will allow new listeners to get some idea of the particular aesthetic universes Pyramids and Horseback usually inhabit, before the rest of Throne obliterates those reference points entirely. Pyramids' contribution sounds like recent Mego in a mellow mood, alternating brief hair-raising moments of dissonance with placid electronics. Horseback title their piece in honor of left-field composer Henry Flynt, and you can (very) vaguely hear Flynt's influence in the way this tribute to Norway's corpse-painted heroes collapses midway through into pure drone, only to rebuild itself for one final assault. "A Throne Without a King" parts one through four, however, sounds not much like either of those modes, except for maybe tiny traces sprinkled through its vast and unruly whole.
As with so many longform experimental compositions, boredom lurks when things get too loose. Part three aims at some kind of icky Ferrari/Dockstader musique concrète, all ominous clangs and rattling iron, but goes on way too long, sapping the drama until it all starts to sound like some goth kids aimlessly futzing around in dad's toolshed. Much better are the moments when Throne goes majestic rather than minimalist. Part two pits angelic choirs against disruptive blasts of static; part four subjects glacial atmosphere à la Wolfgang Voigt to what sounds like several corrupted mp3s' worth of digital distortion. It's here Pyramids and Horseback evoke certain metal qualities, the grandeur and the gloom, the brutality and fearlessness, without needing to actually draw on metal's vocabulary. If they'd managed that across the whole piece, "A Throne Without a King" might be a minor masterpiece of modern, unsettling sound manipulation. As it is, while it's impossible to claim that every minute of Throne will grip you, even if you’re already attuned to this sort of untethered drift, it's a strong, spooky soundtrack for these early frostbitten months of the year.
