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For a band's first outing, this is a remarkably confident record. Formed by SMU film-score classmates Mike Graff and Anthony Headley before vocalist Vaughn Stevenson and bassist Paul Semrad rounded things out, Course of Empire built their identity around a gimmick that somehow never feels gimmicky: two full drum kits going at once, a trick borrowed from watching Japan's Kodo taiko troupe. That choice shapes everything here — the record moves less like a typical guitar band and more like a percussion ensemble that happens to also have guitars. "Ptah" opens the album with spoken narration before the dual drums lock into something tribal and propulsive, setting a template the record returns to throughout: alternating between hypnotic, almost Middle Eastern-tinged grooves and bursts of industrial-leaning alt-metal aggression. "Thrust" — the band's signature live moment, where they'd historically hand drums into the crowd — closes out at over seven minutes and is the clearest distillation of that audience-as-percussion-section ethos. Elsewhere, "Cradle Calls" and "Under the Skies" lean into moodier, more atmospheric territory, while "Sins of the Fathers" and "Coming of the Century" bring sharper, more conventional rock urgency. What's striking in retrospect is how far ahead of its moment this was. Released in 1990, three years before Tool's Undertow and on the same label, the record was working through similar art-rock-meets-metal territory before that combination had a commercial home. It's not as overtly menacing as Tool would be — there's a strange, swirling, almost spiritual quality running underneath the aggression, courtesy of those layered rhythms and Stevenson's enigmatic, oblique lyrics. It's also a very Dallas record, born out of the Deep Ellum scene, and one of those albums that local critics still circle back to decades later precisely because it never got its commercial due relative to its ambition. The 2025 vinyl reissue gave it a second life it probably should've had the first time around.
