Here’s another excellent review from Miles.

I got into Emeralds a little bit after the release of the overwhelmingly beautiful What Happened. Its ambient buzzing and shimmering synths made me a fan just as I realized they were playing a festival 2 hours away from me in New York that had just sold out. After kicking myself in the ass I decided to check out some more of their catalog. These 3 guys realized their potential on What Happened, but it’s on the earlier album Solar Bridge you can hear a band with a tremendous amount of potential building towards something grand.     For anyone wanting to look further into Emeralds, looking back on their discography can be daunting considering how prolific they’ve been, but this is a great place to start. It is difficult to describe such formless music, but the best way I can describe Solar Bridge is it is an album that sounds exactly like the images its title brings to mind. It’s the musical equivalent of staring at the sun. It consists of two tracks that are some of the best and most absorbing drone pieces I’ve heard. It is an album that completely envelopes you in its blurry warmth, and its brevity keeps the album concise and strong, there is not a wasted moment to be found.    The earliest albums I’ve heard by Emeralds such as Allegory of Allergies tend to be more ambient, but this album is where they begin adding more dynamics to create a more ambitious sound that expanded even more onWhat Happened. The second half of “Magic” is wonderful with its synths bubbling away over the drone. “The Quaking Mess” is my favorite track of the two beginning innocently as the gentle guitar wafts through the gorgeous haze; it eventually builds and builds into a blissful blast of noise. Solar Bridge is a tremendous album, and with a pair of headphones one that you can get lost in.

There were a few records in The Wire’s Top 50 of 2008 that I really wanted to check out. One of them was Emeralds Solar Bridge. By the time I knew it existed the fucking thing seemed to have been deleted and it was only last week that hat I managed to track down a copy. In the interim I noticed that Mr Giffoni’s No Fun Productions released a new Emeralds record and although I held off for a while, I ordered it off the No Fun website and it arrived a couple of weeks ago. When I went back to buy the new John Wiese record I noticed that this one has now sold out as well. You should still be able to track down copies of What Happened around the place but I wouldn’t fuck about because if you miss hearing this then you might just miss hearing an important record from a very young but amazing talented band. Emeralds produce waves and waves of transcendent, celestial drone. I kind of wasn’t expecting to hear something so beautiful. When you release records on labels like Aaron Dilloway’s Hanson and No Fun it’s fair to say that many in noise-land would be expecting something a little more noisy and visceral. There are some great drone records being released at he moment and you would be smart to put this at the top of the list. Best album of 2009 so far?