EMPTY THRONE: “UNHOLY”

(At the end of February Downfall Records released the debut album from a group of U.S. metal veterans who’ve taken the name Empty Throne, and today we have DGR‘s extensive and enthusiastic review of what they’ve accomplished on this first full-length.)

One of the most appreciable things about Empty Throne and their new album Unholy is that within the first minute of the opening song “Abbey Of Thelema”, you have a pretty good idea of exactly how this album is going to go and what the band sound like. It has been some time since we’ve had a release that has so clearly laid its cards on the table with an opening furnace blast of music quite like Empty Throne do up until the quiet guitar break in that opening song.

You’ll have a sense of just how much of the group’s death metal with a hint of melodicism, blackened thrash, and gnarly razor-sharp guitars you’ll want from the band right about that point. That’s not to say that Empty Throne aren’t happy to provide other things, but that opening minute lays out the core of a very ambitious band who across six songs and forty minutes have a lot to say — and as it turns out, at a very fast and teeth-shattering tempo as well.

Hybrid bands like Empty Throne are hard to pin down, as there’s always the temptation to treat everything as if it were one-dimensional, but to cast this crew in the mold of ‘it’s death metal’ or ‘it’s black metal’ wouldn’t truly be revealing the whole picture behind this combination of journeymen musicians, who among them have spent time in Angerot, Possessed, Fall, Draconis, and a handful of other groups.

Hell, just the presence of drummer Gabe Seeber alone adds a resume that covers four or five other groups as well as a murderers’ row of live credits. This is a group that for a couple of years even counted former Cannibal Corpse/current Six Feet Under axeman Jack Owen and former Suffocation drummer Mike Smith among the ranks.

Needless to say, there’s a lot more to the spinning whirlpool that is Empty Throne‘s sound that could be best described as “genre-crash”. There has to be a more official name for it, but when the genre-descriptor and sub-tags for a band have more syllables than whatever the official name is for a current psoriasis medication, it starts to feel as if you’ve lost the plot somewhere three cities over. Empty Throne have taken an interesting mix of styles and siphoned off the most vicious parts of each for a snarling take on metal that is sharp enough to be musical razor wire.

Five original tracks and a cover of Immortal‘s “One by One” doesn’t give enough credit to the amount of creativity happening within the halls of Unholy because those five other songs and their exhortations of darkness all park themselves around the six-to-eight-minute range – the last three alone are all hefty seven-plus-minute numbers.

Interestingly, an album like Unholy will have a song parked early on that sounds as if it is the seed from which the rest of the album sprouted. When you’re pulling from so many different directions to make gigantic songs like Empty Throne are unleashing here, there’s a guaranteed one where you just know it’s the point upon which the album turns, the deft combination of everything that makes up that particular album. Empty Throne do have one of those but it isn’t until much later in the track listing, after you’ve already spent three songs – one of which being the aforementioned Immortal cover – getting used to what is on offer from Unholy as a whole. That point is “And All Shall Know His Name”, the fourth song on Unholy and also the point where songs start to reach well past the seven-minute mark in run time.

It seems crazy to say, given the sheer scale of some of the songs present on Unholy, but “And All Shall Know His Name” is a gigantic beast of a song. Maybe it was because they knew they were following a pretty ferocious cover track, but the placement of “And All Shall Know His Name” certainly sets the mood for how the latter part of Unholy and its many exultations of Satan are going to run.

You would think too, that the song would feel like one where they throw everything and the kitchen sink into it just for length, but Empty Throne bend that song to their will, with surgically sharp riffage and a multi-pronged vocal attack as it assails you from different directions each time. There’s little breathing room – not like the acoustic break that closes out the opening song on this album – and instead Empty Throne stack block on top of block until they have a massive wall of a song that contains elements of nearly every other song present within the tracklist. Either it was the seed from which the album was born or it is the point where all of Empty Throne‘s ideas for Unholy begin to really congeal – which makes it a hell of a launching point for the last two songs on the album.

Yet you can see where something like the glorious and arena-worthy speed metal riffage of the titular “Unholy” song would work its way around into longer songs like “That Day Has Come” and “My Flesh The Temptation” to close out the album. Empty Throne never let go of that urge to have their songs running quick, and the fact that there are times throughout wherein they are shamelessly melodic in some of their lead parts explains how the group can have a melodic death metal tag applied to them. They’re not quite as hook-oriented as those groups tend to be but you can see how people lacking for words to describe a hefty leather warrior influence that worms its way throughout Empty Throne‘s snarling performance would default to that. It’s not a bad approach either, but it’s only picking apart one of many elements that Empty Throne are feeding for fuel into their furnace.

There’s definite room for expansion upon Empty Throne‘s sound as displayed in Unholy but a large part of that comes from them already showing they can make a big song without anyone feeling like they’re wearing out their welcome. They are ramming ideas together by sheer force at times but the multitude of guitar work that drives this album is undeniable. They’ve gone out of their way to make sure each part slices through the air and right into the listener’s skull.

Yes, they’re appropriately evil throughout – as they should be given the album title – but there’s so many glory moments and segments that could easily be shout choruses that having a bit of fun with the barbed-wire lashings is unavoidable. Unholy is a bit of a headbanger’s paradise and joyously violent and it grants Empty Throne an extremely solid foothold in the world of death metal to kick off from whenever they choose to continue further.

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