Somehow it didn't make much news that the greatest 70s hard rock album of all time was released a few months ago, and it wasn't even released by any kind of rock band.
Heather Leigh Murray's Throne is the sound of Zeppelin at their most mystical, Sabbath at their most bludgeoning, Leaf Hound, High Tide, Amon Duul II and Mellow Candle sucked through a black hole and forced to build a Stargate for the fusion tyrant demiurge that used to be Jennifer James Herrema and Kenneth Anger. It's not deconstructed as much as sublimated - the skein of hot Critic Words that best describe it is the "nocturnal, hushed, somnambulant" cluster, but also "quicksilver, mercurial, alchemical." It levitates, just Murray and her pedal steel spinning/summoning the simultaneously lightest and heaviest filigree of soundstuff. And it's heavy in a way that has nothing to do with its musical quality, like a Clarice Lispector novel or summat.
The songs seem to recount a loosely-connected tale of lust and magick, shot through with vintage 70s lingo and a blending of the intensely personal and the cosmic. Hypnotic opener "Prelude to Goddess" can barely contain its insinuation of macho swagger and latent menace and "Lena" plays with slang to spin a memory that may only want you to think that it's about incest.
In the end, the album plays like apologism for the entire edifice of 70s cock rock that it teases and appropriates - like a sage nod in the direction of your secret belief that "Kashmir" still kicks more ass than any New Order or Depeche Mode song if we're going to be perfectly honest, and it does it without ever actually sounding a damn thing like Grand Funk or Deep Purple or apologizing for the musicians' celebrated debauchery, thank the Goddess.
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