Review by Sonny for Aureole - Alunarian Bellmaster (2024)

Aureole is a solo project of Markov Soroka, whose work I have enjoyed under a couple of his other projects, the funeral doom of Drown and the black and death metal of Tchornobog, but his output as Aureole has always left me a bit cold. This is mainly down to the excessive (for me) ambient content of the project's work, except on his split with Mare Cognitum, where he turned in a decent couple of tracks of icy atmo-black to outshine Jacob Buczarski on that one, which is no mean feat it must be said.

Well, he appears to have doubled down on the ambience with Alunarian Bellmaster, to the degree where what we have here is essentially an ambient album with very little actual black metal. There is some BM present, but it is so toned-down and steeped in ambience that it is barely detectible, at least to my tinnitus-ridden ears. I suppose I should state the obvious at this point and declare that I am not a huge fan of ambient music, it quite frankly bores me most of the time and if I need the kind of fix that ambient gives then I tend to turn to drone or funeral doom. I have sat through the album's hour-long runtime once and quite frankly, that's enough for me. It's not that I hate it by any means, it doesn't really register on a deep enough level for such a strong emotion, but I can live without it most easily.