adg211288
Extended ambient music pieces being used in black metal albums isn't anything new, Burzum was well known for it even, but I do have to question the idea behind kicking off a black metal album with an almost twelve and a half minute long ambient composition. That's exactly what Lebanese cosmic black metal act Auriga have done with their second full-length album VII - Dimensions of Asymmetry (2016) and its opening track Floating Through Infinity.
Don't get me wrong here, I like a bit of ambient, especially space ambient as Auriga play and am not opposed to opening the album in this style, but having a track that they themselves denote as the intro track last for that long and be the longest song on the album is rather unusual. Unusual can be good, but here I'm not convinced that it works. They are primarily a black metal band, and I don't think I'm only speaking for myself when I say that it takes simply too long for the record to get going with what the band are really all about. I wouldn't mind something that long (or longer) closing the album, in fact I can name a couple of albums I really like that do just that (Burzum's Hvis Lyset Tar Oss and Spectral Lore's Sentinel), but when I listen to a black metal album I want it to grab me quickly. Because the way Auriga have decided to write this album, it gets off to an extremely slow start. In stark contrast the outro piece Crossing the Horizon is just two minutes twenty second long, the shortest piece on the album. It may have been more effective to have switched them. At the very least it's my opinion that Floating Through Infinity should have been trimmed to at least a third of its current length, if not more.
While that's not the end of the pure ambient work on VII - Dimensions of Asymmetry the band do at least then get going with an almost as long black metal track in the form of Catenulate Ornaments In A Cosmic Creation. I find that the band handle the creation of a truly cosmic sounding atmosphere better than some artists with similar aesthetics do, presenting something that still draws heavily on ambient but with a cold, raw harshness to it as well. Pure ambient passages still crop up here and there but from this point on they are balanced better with the black metal, so all in all VII - Dimensions of Asymmetry does end up being quite a decent listen from Auriga, though I don't find it to be anything particularly standout either. They could get there though, as there are decent ideas here, particularly with the ambient elements aside from that exceptionally long intro.