New Risen Throne - Loneliness of Hidden Structures

With a quiet beginning, we find ourselves soon in the land of Italy's New Risen Throne. This is the band's conclusion to a trilogy of albums which document the end of all things literal and figurative, and now through this new release: the beginnings of a new existence. I can best summarize the feel of this record thusly: on 18 May 1980, a couple hundred miles from where I live, Mount St. Helens erupted in a violent, fiery cataclysm which leveled forests and laid waste to man's encroaching industry into the wild. Entire lakes were wiped off the face of the Earth, many lives were lost, rivers flooded and an eerie darkness covered vast swathes of the sky for days. All we could do was sit in a stunned state of shock glued to our television sets whilst witnessing destruction on a scale unparalleled by anything humanity could conjure. It was as if a great hand had reached up out of the darkness and pulled the mountain down into the depths on a whim. Brave indeed were the people who remained behind and lived in the red zone which the government's geological scientific team had demarcated.

I remember seeing a photograph around that time of a meadow which had become a burial ground for hundreds (if not thousands) of plants and animals. Torn,incinerated skin poked through the ever consuming suffocating ash, feathers ruffled silently in the widening silence which the wind interrupted only to disperse more of the lethal gases which had escaped from deep beneath the crust. The sun hung low, smoldering angrily as if to condemn us for daring to think we were above the natural forces which governed our world... and yet... a single, solitary pink bloom somehow existed in such a place; the barest semblance of what had been and all that remained. It was doused thoroughly in soot, volcanic rock seethed not far from where it had taken root but it's resilience and stern mastery was unquestioned. Serenely it looked out upon this scene of extinguished life and only dug in harder.

Some time later, decades in fact, I found myself standing in that very place as if by accident. The road trip I was part of to the area had elected to stop and rest for a bit near the surrounds and rather than stay in the vehicle playing insanely heroic drinking games, I had elected to wander off because something struck me as very familiar about where we were. I came upon this same meadow and marveled at how that singular flower's legacy had overtaken the entire field; no trace of that dour, dank and deathly no-man's land remained. A lush carpet of flora covered the grounds completely, why there were even trees which had sprung up in the intervening years and they shaded vast microcosms of mosses, mollusks and naturally mushrooms (an entirely different tale which I'll curtail here). Water flowed in resurrected streams and the obsidian stones in their bed had been polished to a regal hue, here and there flickers of fish snapped at the swarms of insects huddled around the algae.

In much the same way this ecosystem rebounded from complete and utter decimation, New Risen Throne have begun the mammoth task of rebuilding the sonic landscape they utterly smote with their last two albums and to sweeten the deal even more they have included remixes executed by Nordvargr and the fascinatingly elusive Northaunt. You don't get this level of involvement artistically that often and I have to say that it's very satisfying to get demanding material like this to sink my teeth into. The deeply resonating miasma of drones, percussion and I do believe I detect some kind of heavily processed vocalizations bring us back to the beginning... a cycle now complete. The journey getting to this destination was a perilous, vitriolic one at times -go listen to their previous one 'Crossing the Withered Regions' if you'd like to experience it first hand- but now we emerge along with New Risen Throne to the genesis of the next age... who knows what lies in wait beyond the veil we've now passed through. Nov 04 2011