Thrones

Joe Preston first came to the attention of music fans as a member of the Melvins, playing bass on Lysol and the Kiss-themed Joe Preston, both released in 1992. After leaving the Melvins, the Seattle native launched Thrones, his one-man double-necked bass band. Mixing in samples, tape loops and atmospheric noises, Preston puts both the bass and his voice through a wall of effects and plays trudgingly-paced doom metal along to a drum machine. Affecting his voice to sound at times like a chorus of angels and at others like a depressed grizzly bear, Preston makes music that, while structured fairly traditionally, is beyond weird. The heavy use of delay makes funeral marches and crushing stoner metal passages take on a psychedelic trance quality. In other songs, majestic explosions of heavenly robots shake off the murk in a sunburst marriage of noise-metal power and, um, opera (no, really! See "Obolus" on Sperm Whale). Thrones have released a pair of full-lengths (Alraune in 1996 and Sperm Whale in 2000), several seven-inches and EPs, and have appeared on a bunch of Kill Rock Stars comps.