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. Continue reading »