Hello again, world. For a good while, I wasn't sure if I would ever post here again. Quite a few things have changed since my last post. I changed jobs, my mom is moving to a new neighborhood, my sister is living in a different country (follow her Irish escapades on her blog: The Novelest). I'm doing what I can to balance a full course-load, a ten-hour workweek and various forms of impending doom (midterms, papers, floods, etc.). Basically, the ol' blog got put on the backburner for far longer than I had anticipated. At the end of the day, though, I don't want Ramblings of the Guitarman to be some project I toyed with for a while and then abandoned. I may not get much in the way of traffic here, but I'm fairly fond of having my own little corner of the interwebs. I'm not going to do something irresponsible like promise regular updates and then leave you all hanging for another year, but I will do my best to keep the site updated. It might not be all band reviews, but I should find something to put here every now and then.
With that in mind, I have a treat for all two of my readership who comes here for music stuff and not just because they typed in "rotgm" instead of "rotmg" when looking for info on Realm of the Mad God (yes, I am aware that the similarity makes it really hard to actually find this blog; no, I am far too fond of the acronym to consider changing it this far in). Here's some free music!
While I admit to not actually finding them myself (I found them through Angry Metal Guy, and his excellent self-titled blog), Iron Thrones is too good of a band for me to skip over. This Minneapolis-based metal outfit disbanded back in 2012, but produced two killer albums back when they were still active. They somehow managed to combine prog-y melodeath with metalcore, of all things, and the result is far more coherent than you might expect. In case you were wondering which half of the equation is more responsible for the songwriting, take a gander at the track lengths. We're talking as long as 12 minutes in some cases, and they go by effortlessly (no small feat, that). This is a band that could transition with effortless grace from beautiful prog arrangements to crushing breakdowns and back again. Their second album, The Wretched Sun, features the usual clean/hardcore vocal transitions you might expect of this type of music, but their first album, Visions of Light, manages with only the hardcore half of the package. Oddly enough, the music doesn't suffer for it. You'd think that maintaining the same vocal delivery over such varied musical passages would in some way be detrimental to the flow of songs, but it actually works here. The vocals variously wash over or pummel through the listener, as called for by the song.
This is the part of the review where I'd usually try and justify my title of Guitarman by commenting on the axe-work employed by Iron Thrones. It's certainly impressive, but it's so far divorced from my area of expertise that I find it difficult to comment on. The playing is tight, and there are certainly some some memorable riffs here (the main riff from Heart of the Light, for example), but riffs really aren't the focus. This isn't a band that writes a riff, puts a song around it, and then slaps on a guitar solo for good measure. The focus is more on chord progressions, rhythms and the vocals than on any given riff. I suppose that might be a product of the band's metalcore influences, and I do appreciate that it keeps the prog half from getting too self-indulgent. Iron Thrones writes good songs, not just good riffs, which is a nice change of pace from the Dream-Theater-clone-of-the-week type of progressive metal we usually get. All in all, I highly recommend Iron Thrones to fans of progressive music looking for something a little more raw, and to fans of metalcore looking for something a touch more layered and complex. I'd recommend Iron Thrones to all of you, actually, so long as you don't mind harsh vocals. I get that they're an acquired taste, but one well worth the price of admission in my humble opinion. Give them a spin at their Bandcamp page, ironthrones.bandcamp.com, for free downloads of both Visions of Light and The Wretched Sun. Alternatively, if you're feeling particularly lazy, just use the widgets I linked earlier in this post.
Until next time,
Guitarman
