Joe Preston has cited Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian as his favorite book and there's something of the desolate west to the music he creates as Thrones; but whereas McCarthy's band of dispossessed killers roamed a blood red landscape littered with the corpses of Indians and outlaws Preston rides alone, past clotted ravines where bears scavenger amidst discarded Commodore 64s and busted calliopes while Stanley Kubrick holds a neon-lit vigil . It's a land where the prelapsarian American maverick collides with the post industrial age and its wreckage, and over it all preside the angels known as Thrones, or 'ophanim'; wheels of God's chariot and serene administrators of divine judgment. Here brutality, as in McCarthy's world, is just another manifestation of mystic will.
Preston has drifted through the underground music scene for years working (mostly on bass) as a hired gun for bands such as The Melvins, Earth, SunnO, High On Fire and Harvey Milk; a Johnny Appleseed, or perhaps Wayfaring Stranger, of heavily amplified experimental fuckery. In these contexts he is but a voice in the choir, subsumed in the group dynamic, but in Thrones he works alone, handling vocals, bass, guitar, synthesizer and drum machine, recording mostly on cheap digital portastudios. He performs live as well, using prerecorded backing tracks, a bass and an array of effects. I saw him perform in Portland last year and it was an unexpectedly moving and inspiring experience; watching this solitary man on stage channeling these strange & forceful yet fragile whirls of sound gave me hope.
The first stirrings of the Thrones aesthetic emerged on the 1992 Joe Preston EP, his solo debut recorded as part of a typically perverse Melvins project: three simultaneous solo albums, one by each member of the band, in homage to the infamous Kiss solo albums of the late 70s. The sound here is closer to his work with The Melvins and Earth, the centerpiece being the long Hands First Flower, a crushing titan of guitar drone commencing with a sample from Apocalypse Now. 1992's Alraune was the Thrones debut proper and boasted more complex songs, more diverse instrumentation and hints of the cinematic sound that would come to define the band.
Sperm Whale/White Rabbit (2000) is Thrones' homecoming and one of the most beautiful, baffling and fucked up records of its time. On many of the tracks Preston electronically processes his gruff, wounded vocals into a choir of bruised electric angels hovering over a sonic battlefield of broken drum machine rhythms, distorted bass, sci-fi soundtracks and synth washes. Prog, heavy metal and soundtrack music sit side by side, sometimes on top of one another in a glorious heap where beauty and disgust are indistinguishable. Overlaying it all is a sort of gothic western symbolism; images of rabbits, whales and whaling vessels abound; songs are named for bears (Oso Malo, The Anguish Of Bears); Django, a spaghetti western theme, is covered; some thirty minutes of backwoods ambiance - a forest nocturne of frogs and crickets - closes the record. Herman Melville might approve.
Obolus is perhaps the best Thrones track and showcases Preston's under-appreciated gift for beautiful minor key melody and twisted chorales. Listen to the glorious contrast of rhythm and melody and the way he builds tension during the vocal crescendos by withholding the downbeat. Beautiful.
This version comes from Day Late, Dollar Short (2005), an excellent compilation of singles and outtakes and as of this writing the only other Thrones full length.
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