(Sacramento-based DGR reviews a very recently released EP by Sacramento-based Emberthrone, and comes away happy.)
Sacramento’s Emberthrone are one we’ve kept a curious eye on for a little bit now. Part of a small-town-sized wave of deathcore-leaning projects that sprang up in the lockdown years wherein a lot of people suddenly had a bunch of free time out of nowhere for some reason, Emberthrone seemed like a solid union with a lot of potential just based off of its lineup alone at the time. Uniting some of the scene’s workhorses for vocals and drums in the form of Monte Bernard and Gabe Seeber, the group’s complete portrait included bassist Quentin Garcia and guitarist Martin Bianchini.
Their group’s four-song debut Godless Wonder found them a home on Seek & Strike, a label that has slowly developed an arc for being the home of boutique ass-kickers in prefix-core heavy form. Godless Wonder was a reliably solid brick of music that fell perfectly in line with a lot of the bruisers that’ve emerged from California’s filing cabinet over the years. In the three years hence, though, the lineup for Emberthrone has remained fairly solid save for what seems to be a new face behind the kit, translating into an interesting round two for the band.
Now more matured and gelled together as a band, Emberthrone returned in early-July with a second EP bearing the name Cursive that seems to be forged by experience and a stronger vision of what sort of project they want to be, while also much more determined to throw its heft around than they did before.
Cursive — much like its older sibling — is a four-song EP that clocks in at about twenty-two minutes’ worth of music. Despite the gap of time between releases, however, Emberthrone don’t stray too far from their foundational sound as it had been portrayed three years earlier. This is still a cinderblock thrown through the window style of bruiser-heavy deathcore, likely one of the more proudly blatant about it of the groups we have covered regularly. But Emberthrone go for a neck-snapping head-turn about halfway into Cursive, right when it seemed like they had found their sound in a sort of brutally groove-heavy style of “-core”, into an area of town that is more traditionally brutal-death than you might expect.
Cursive becomes a two-faced coin in that way, with the opening part of the EP sounding as if Emberthrone are gently transitioning the listener into realms slightly heavier than they had been before and then the coin flipping halfway through and all of a sudden Emberthrone have a song built out of sledgehammers and crushed rock.
Emberthrone lie at the cross-section of tech-heavy and core-heavy that has grown in the last decade. They are part of a veritable army of projects all doing battle with one another in a brawl to scrawl their names on the walls of who can groove the hardest. Cursive is at the least a tome written to that, with not a single song daring to crawl in under the five-minute mark. Were this combined with their first EP from 2022, Emberthrone would already have a forty-minute bludgeoning to unleash upon the world.
As it stands now though, Cursive opens with the twists, turns, and entanglements of its title song — one which is well within the early established home zone for the band. “Cursive” is cymbal heavy in its opening, multi-pronged on its vocal attack, and the guitar melodies are bent just enough to sound eerily tortured. Emberthrone are pulling in elements from a wider genre-trek, so when you detect a bass guitar dragged up to the front to springboard itself along the main rhythm riff in the middle of “Cursive”, you can hear as the tech-death side of the metal world is basically grabbed by one ear and pulled backwards into “Cursive’s” gravitational pull.
“Dulling The Blade” is an equally chugging guitar-heavy song, predisposed toward a bare-knuckled beating for five-minutes. “Dulling The Blade” was also one of the first singles that Emberthrone let slip out prior to the release of Cursive as a whole, so it is somewhat likely it might’ve landed in front of some of you. “Dulling The Blade” is the slightly faster brother of the opening pairing, though you could likely get lost in a dreamlike state with both, as Emberthrone enjoy writing in a hefty mid for their main propulsion vehicle.
Some bands strap their songs to rockets and launch them into a wall; others let them drag themselves along city streets in a smoke-induced haze; Emberhtrone are offroading on a rough suspension with as bouncy as their opening two are, rumbled rhythms and shredded shocks alike. Credit due for the handful of guitar solos and leads that are interwoven throughout the whole song, including the near-Fallujah-esque echoing guitar melody that sails above the bass guitar before the band’s final “I never needed to be saved” refrain to end the song.
Which could be why “Failed Suicide Pact” comes across as a shock at the halfway point of Cursive, because suddenly the song just by opening alone is a recognizable league heavier on the brutality front than Emberthrone had previously been playing with. Part of that may be due to them somehow seeming to lure one of the Vitriol crew off the road just long enough to help out with the song.
Emberthrone are quick to rappel their way back down to their groovier chugging-guitar comfort zone after having lifted their listeners into a firestorm to start things off, but “Failed Suicide Pact” is one of the longer songs on Cursive and it is the time wherein Emberthrone do stretch those artistic muscles. Coupled with a challenging guitar solo, Embethrone allow for moments of ambience before one final clobbering and diagonally darting their way through all the groundwork that had been laid out by the first two songs on their latest EP. “Failed Suicide Pact” also helps to segue its listeners into the EP’s final heavy drop of a song in the equally lengthy and just as exploration-heavy “Stripped Screws Hammered Deeper”.
Emberthrone are doing battle in an immensely crowded genre space, the sort of fight where whatever closed space is so tightly packed that they’re having to use bare hands to claw and tear at one another by sheer virtue of the fact that no one has any room in which to draw a weapon, and in that way the band remain interesting. How they chose to stick out and get noticed in the grand heavy metal deluge that washes over us each year is part of what makes Cursive intriguing on first go — as even though the band have clearly matured in their sound and have forged these particular four songs into the finest blades they could offer, it still sounds like they are growing into the Emberthrone they truly want to be.
EP work can be just as much a sampling of upcoming delights as it can be a real-time look at a work in progress. Emberthrone are still hammering themselves into the potential beast that they seem born to be; the heavier aspects of Cursive hitting like cannon fire and their melodic explorations being just bent enough to dodge around the “hey, here’s the pretty part” shows a clear recognition that this is a project destined to groove in worlds far, far heavier.
Cursive is already four promising blades that do tease an Emberthrone that is fairly concrete in its standing and with that solid platform could now expand upon its ideas to grow into full-length album territory.
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