(DGR wrote this review of the new album by Southern California’s Empyrean Throne.)

There exists an alternate reality where the fusion of black metal and death metal, instead of favoring the atmospheres of the icefrost and bleak of the black metal side, took on the more mechanical and firebreathing aspects of the death metal spectrum. Where most blackened death metal tends to favor the ritual and romanticized pomp-and-circumstance theatricality loaned to it by its colder atmosphere-favoring brethren, in this alternate reality it instead leaned toward the heavier groove.

It’s not often that you see the phrase “sun-baked” attached to a disc, yet here we stand with Southern California act Empyrean Throne and their brand of symphonic bombast layered over a large feast of mechanized death metal, with the black metal aspect providing its ritual airs and snarling nihilism to the overall affair.

The group’s recently released album Chaosborne sounds like it was written from within a furnace, every song pushed to the maximum in terms of volume, and the instrumentation following suit, making grandiose sweeping movements from one carved-out blast to the next one. It envisions a world in which the entire planet is basically the high-desert, segments of sand so dry that it looks like it was created in a kiln and shaped into tiles, and those somehow still managing to crack under the heat of the sun. Continue reading »