Throne - Where Tharsis Sleeps EP

So much for that rainbowed, unicorned utopia promise from merely five years ago; so much for “getting back to The Garden”, as it were. All those rose-tinted, dewy promisors from then, where are they now? John, Paul, where’d you go? Bobby D, we haven’t heard from him in a while…even C, S, N, and Y have gone into hiding. We’ve been visited by an alien, but Christ, now even Ziggy is dead! The path forward, if there is one, seems ominous – the boys from Black Sabbath appeared to have become our most relevant shepherds these days, but even their efforts have begun to wane. Really, who expected Ozzy & Co. to manage to carry on much further anyway? Fortunately we have new bands like Throne to take up the Sabs’ teetering two-tons of riffage mantle on their latest EP, Where Tharsis Sleeps.

As is the fashion of today, it’s a concept album; briefly, we blow open Mars’ dormant volcanic region of Tharsis with a nuke, warming its surface to foster human existence. Then we build a bridge and scoot on over there, leaving this God-forsaken planet behind. How’s that for getting back to The Garden, huh. Suitably, Throne stomps and slogs and front man Nicos Livesay celestially bellows akin to our future inevitable robot overlords over the band’s Himalayan-sized groove on every track. They even toss in a chugging Deep Purple-tinted instrumental bridge midway through “Surface Of Stone” to change the pace. If you’re thinking this sounds like what it looks, given the premise and titles, you’d be spot on. Part of me sees the inanity in it all, another part of me sees the terrifying potential realization of it as well.

When Livesay howls, “chaos/brews in this sphere/in the hands of man for years” on “Molten Tomb”, he’s touching on any number of contemporary man-made threats to our own existence, including the dreaded A-bomb used in their fiction here. Just nearly three decades removed from Hiroshima and Nagasaki and half that from the Cuban Missile Crisis, still in the throes of the Cold War, its spectre looms still. On “Ascender”, he self-identifies as “ascender, creator, frustrator…seek solace in the abyss”, taking refuge from the madness in his solitary endeavor. At this rate, if or when we make it to, say, 40 years down the road to 2014, if politicians then still fall over themselves for any scrap of power, if the Russians continue clamoring to expand their sphere of influence, if mankind blindly pushes its quest of running this planet into the ground, Throne could very well be relevant still. Maybe the sound of the times will change – as much as I deny it, surely someday my orange kitchen walls and the shag carpet delectably crunching between my toes will become passé – but the message remains as undiluted as ever.

Perhaps you’re thinking this all seems a bit far-fetched and silly. Mark my word, if we make it to 2014 – or even beyond – and should this planet continue on after you and I become dust, when the flames kick at our howling bones ‘neath the ground as mankind undertakes its desperate but necessary colonization of Mars, Throne will say, “I told you so”.