There are times that Mr. Deaddie and Mr. Steinmetal seems to be trying your Old Big Daddy here...

Yes, another extremely experimental and difficult album is presented by EMPIRE AURIGA, a band from United States, for their second full length, "Ascending the Solar Throne", is something astonishing.

They play a subgenre of Black Metal that seemed to be dead since the second part of the 90's, Dark Ambient/Industrial Black Metal, and this means a very difficult style for an analysis. Yes, it's hard, because the music is done in a more Industrial and experimental way, focusing efforts on keyboards and electronic effects to create a morbid and dense musical atmosphere, darkened and morbid. It reminds sometimes what Norway's AGHAST used to do, but using more effects and guitars (it seemed to have some there in the deep of music), and some ghostly and harsh voices coming howling from out of nowhere. And to dose used to sound make with guitars and drums could be a hard work to understand, but it's not as bad as it can seem from the start. In reality, it's very good.

In the production, we can hear that the efforts really are to do their music this way, sometimes seeming to exist a superposing of the instruments. But it's the way the album have to be, nothing is clearer than that to my ears.

Their music is extremely hypnotic and catching sometimes, and hearing songs like "Jubilee Warlord", the aggressive nightmare "The Solarthrone" (sometimes the vocals seem like a Gregorian Chant), "Planetary Awakening" and "Are You Worthy of Gold?" really can catch some new fans.

For Metal fans used to Industrial Metal and Ambient music.