Four years ago we premiered and reviewed at length The Shrine of Deterioration, the second album by the Polish “black/doom” band Above Aurora. It followed the dark and desolate path whose first steps were marked by the band’s 2016 debut album Onward Desolation and their 2018 EP Path To Ruin.
That second album created an almost relentlessly shattering and yet also wholly enthralling experience. No surprise, we leaped at the chance to premiere the band’s forthcoming third album, Myriad Woes, which we do today in advance of its March 29 release by War Anthem Records.
It’s obvious from the album’s title alone that Above Aurora‘s worldview has not brightened over the last four years, and the music is as dark and devastating as you might expect from their previous works, but they have managed to increase the scale and colossal power of the traumas they transmit, as well as providing dramatic contrasts in tone, volume, and speed, variations in style, and melodic nuances that are piercing in the midst of cataclysms.
The new album’s opening song, “Inner Whispers“, is the longest track of the five present here. Extending to nearly 11 1/2 minutes, it’s a daunting experience. The sound slowly swells, like a rising tide of unsettling weight, ominously droning and mysteriously glittering. When the reverberating drums arrive, they sound like bombs slowly detonating and trees cracking. Sad but scintillating notes ring out, also mystically reverberating. A woman speaks… and then the music becomes an order of magnitude more disconcerting.
A pair of guitars skitter and whine in piercing, abrasive fevers, and moan in despair — leading toward a sudden eruption of blasting drums, hurtling bass, and roiling, scathing fretwork-convulsions that feel like a traumatic emotional meltdown. Even when the snare rhythmically pops and the bass vigorously bubbles, and even when the drums vanish, the dense and abrading guitars don’t relent.
When the rhythm section return, a male voice also solemnly speaks in the midst of the tidal string-tortures — another prelude to another trauma of caustic swarming riffage, battering drums, and thundering bass, a maelstrom in which the lead guitar seems to wail.
Unlike many opening tracks on many albums, “Inner Whispers” doesn’t provide an easy path into the album, but it’s an honest greeting, because the rest of the album doesn’t get any emotionally easier.
The follow-on song “Spark” introduces one more ingredient — raw and ragged snarls of torment and anger, which unfold over another rolling blizzard of writhing and dismally chiming guitars and big body-moving grooves, which pave the way toward another cataclysm of sound in which the lead guitar brilliantly flickers and flares, transfixing attention. And then there’s another ingredient — a vivid acoustic guitar instrumental that seems almost buoyant, but soon drenched in another sonic deluge of dissonant, harrowing, and howling intensity.
In the songs yet to come, Above Aurora do continue providing gifts of big booming bass lines and head-moving drum patterns, as viscerally compelling life-lines you can hold onto while the riffing rages and the vocals roar. They also continue allowing the lead guitar to seize the spotlight, even though its ringing, chiming, and sweeping displays rarely provide much comfort — they’re mesmerizing appearances, but nonetheless distraught.
In other ways, the band keep listeners perched on the edge of seats, and not merely because of the continuing resurgence of emotionally ruinous calamities and the sudden shifts in pacing and percussive patterns. They bring to bear crushing and bombastic weight in the low end; startling riffs that slash and pulsate as well as send the blizzards; bursts of incinerating vocal intensity (and a few more dismal spoken words); and dissonant anti-melodies that create labyrinths of dark and devastating moods; all of it presented through a production that provides contrasts of gargantuan power, glittering clarity, and ice-storm abrasion.
The combined effect of all the band’s frequent permutations is electrifying. The way in which they interweave elements of black metal, post-metal, and even industrial and bleak post-punk (as we hear it), is inventive and well-calculated to elucidate black moods without dragging listeners into some monotonous, choking tar-pit of hopelessness and helplessness. And here and there, perhaps especially in the exhilarating brilliance of the massed guitars that carry the final song “No More Shall the Boulder Descend“, they also create visions of splendor.
Myriad Woes was recorded at Antisound Studio with Michał “Neithan” Kiełbasa. It was mixed and mastered by Filip Hałucha (Heinrich House Studio). The cover artwork was created by Dominika Pera.
War Anthem will release the album on CD, LP, and digital formats, with distribution via Cudgel Vertrieb.
WAR ANTHEM / CUDGEL:
https://war-anthem-records.bandcamp.com/album/myriad-woes
https://www.cudgel.de
ABOVE AURORA:
https://aboveaurora.bandcamp.com/album/myriad-woes
https://www.facebook.com/aboveaurorapl
https://www.instagram.com/aboveaurora