FINALLY!!! This is one of my most-wanted releases to come. I just adore Empire Auriga’s debut album Auriga Dying, and when Moribund did re-release this material for a second time in 2011 (it was self-released in 2006 and re-released a first time in 2008), it was announced to be some teaser for the upcoming album that would see the unlight later that very same year. Well, f*ck it! We had to wait until now to experience the successor of Empire Auriga’s Auriga Dying, but as said: Ascending The Solar Throne finally is a fact.
The trio from Lansing, Michigan, U.S.Aaaarghh, goes on within a very comparable vein with Ascending The Solar Throne. This sophomore album, which has a total running time of just over forty minutes, once again brings an obscure, oppressive, suffocating and ominous mixture of Dark Ambient, grim Black Metal, droning Industrial, funereal Doom, noisy Ambient and apocalyptic soundwaves. There is a lot of dissonance, yet without being unstructured (though, it is destructured / destructuring / destructive), and it’s quite chaotic, yet once again, not unstructured. It’s based on long-stretched melody lines, created by post-nuclear-sounding guitar riffs and eerie synth lines, of a rather slow-paced kind, with a certain repetition, yet one that does not fall into endlessly-repeating boredom. There’s even some melancholy within the most-hypnotic excerpts, and some depression when the grimness really overtakes the overall atmosphere.
The main difference might be that there is less variety this time. Of course it still thrills because of the wide-open approach, and the interplay of many different genres, as well as the multi-levelled structures, and so on… But ascending The Throne Of Solace is much more one-directional than Auriga Dying, with more focus on (Funeral Doom / Black) Metal; of course from the most oppressive, hypnotic and asphyxiating kind. Besides, there are no Martial or Neo-Folk elements anymore, and the atmosphere is much more of the bleak, even depressing kind.
My review on the former album was not long, and this one will not be either. I was about to add ‘let the music do the talking’, but that might be too absurd. Let the Aural Art do the mentally-sick talking fits better to Empire Auriga’s reality.