���Having not heard their previous album and going from a couple of things I had heard about this Michigan duo's music, I was initially expecting Empire Auriga to offer something along the lines of an Aborym / Mysticum-style industrial black metal assault, but these guys actually turned out to be something much more interesting than just another eruption of mechanized necro. There's a little bit of an industrial element to Empire Auriga's sound, but the eight songs that stretch across the band's latest album Ascending The Solarthrone really forms a kind of heavily atmospheric and abstract wall of sound, informed by black metal aesthetics but more like a kind of distorted, orchestral ambiance, sprawling out into vast interstellar clouds. The band cites Neptune Towers as one of the influences, but this stuff is something entirely different, mournful kosmische soundscapes laced with amorphous icy guitar riffs and swirling with gaseous electronics.

��� "Prophetic Light" blends together vast orchestral drone and pounding, blown-out drumming with swirling synthesizers and waves of distorted noise, opening the album with a vaguely industrial-tinged sound as eerie mournful melodies are distorted to the point where they transform into an over-modulated buzz. This massive cosmic dronescape crackles with distortion and electricity, the band emitting an intensely dramatic and dour feel; that leads into the similarly noisy "Jubilee Warlord", where layered guitars form a fog of mournful blackened sound, awash in swarming noise and droning synth, achingly gorgeous black metal style melodies arcing across the song's majestic churn. Each track similarly sprawls out into one of these dramatic, droning mini-symphonies of kosmische black drift, and its not till the third song that we even begin to hear any real rhythmic elements on the album; on "The Solarthrone", tympani-like drums slowly reverberate in the distance, lost in a haze of spoken lyrics and those swirling minor key arpeggios, washes of dissonant guitar and crackling electronics, a thick fog of celestial static and distortion falling across everything. And when the stirring falsetto singing starts to slowly drift in from afar, it's almost as if you're listening to some black metal-tinged take on Cocteau Twins, or a delirious fusion of black noise metallers Sutekh Hexen and the incandescent roar of Loveless-era My Bloody Valentine.

��� This is really great stuff, can't believe I've never heard these guys before. Solarthrone is filled with those intensely striking moments of sky-shattering beauty - "Planetary Awakening" may be the most soul-wrenching thing I've heard all week - and despite the occasional emergence of some half-formed rhythmic element that creeps out of the nebular depths of their songs, most of the album centers around those amorphous and crumbing black kosmische driftscapes, threaded with strange robotic mutterings and whirling starlit ambiance bathed in cold light and looping, muted melodies, often resembling a darker, bleaker blackened version of Nadja, or, as on the closing track "The Last Passage of Azon Grul", dissolving completely into a final epic wash of breathtaking Tangerine Dream-esque beauty bathed in crushing distortion. Absolutely stunning.