��Throned Upon Ashes Of Dusk is the third and latest album from long-running Italian necro-mopester Enthroning Silence, a project from one of the guys who used to play in the cult black metal band Mortuary Drape. Returning after a nearly decade-long absence, Enthroning Silence delivers more of their icy, sorrowful black metal via these six sprawling tracks of depressive, grainy gloom that falls somewhere in the vicinity of bands like Trist, Happy Days, Lifelover and Hypothermia, laced with searing Katatonic hooks and deliriously dreary melodies that break through the band's buzzing, blown-out ambience. It's a sound that I continue to be obsessed with, that mix of gorgeously grim and catchy gloom-pop and murky, miserable black metal, and these guys offer a killer variant on the sound, mixing it with some cool, almost mathy riffing and a vaguely bent songwriting style.

�� Enthroning Silence's sound is based in that style of mournful, emotional black metal that gets described as "depressive", crafting a dramatic, dreary atmosphere across the album's hour long running time, but it's intensely raw production-wise, giving their bleary, Burzumic buzzscapes more of a filthy, ash-encrusted feel than usual, which contrasts nicely with the band's gorgeously dreary melodies. Most of the songs can stretch out for ten minute or more, the opener "Autumn Embers" establishing the rather raw, murky sound as the band unleashes volleys of pummeling double bass drumming and catchy, brokenhearted tremolo riffs and dour melodies. This is bleak, grey music, achingly beautiful but also possessed with a charred underbelly of fuzz-drenched acid-etched guitar riffs and those scathing shrieking vocals. The songs shift into some fantastic, spidery, almost math rock-style minor key melodies that gives this stuff an additional unique touch, but there's also quite a bit of that sinister post-punk influence in some of the album's catchier moments. Even with the long sprawling song lengths, the band's songwriting strengths keep this from getting too monotonous by constantly shifting through various passages within a song, flowing from that grainy black metal blast to gleaming, dissonant Cure-esque guitar melodies and churning, slower blackened riffage, slipping from swarming tremolo buzz into some wicked driving mid-tempo grooves, each song a blurry, monochrome symphony of abject sorrow and longing and existential dread, sometimes moving at blazing blastbeat tempos, often sinking into an utterly forlorn lurch. And like many of the other better albums of miserablist black metal I've been listening to lately, the terminally doomed ghost of Pornography-era Cure lurks somewhere off in the shadows of Throned Upon Ashes, a pervasive post-punk vibe bubbling to the surface on some of the album's catchier songs like "The Mournful Season" and "In Thy Advent, My Triumph".

�� Comes in a digipack package with an eight page booklet.