Plumbing the depths for their fourth album are Australian occult black metallers Moon. Atmosphere, atmosphere and atmosphere was what I was expecting from this one.
Sure enough we’re plunged into an echoing violent world from the beginning. Haunting and distant roars stand behind the thickening gloom. “Shadow of the Endless Abyss” lives up to its name. It’s like a dark journey through a cosmic void, broken up by the odd explosion but always with that echoing roar. The spooky journey continues with nigh on 13 minutes of “Upon the Eye of the Void”. Resounding weighty gloom rumbles on dissonantly with the roaring echo in the windswept and haunting backdrop. “Portal through the Black Flame” has the ambient air of Burzum’s “Filosofem” while the haunting torture of “Hollow Transcendence” creates a similar nihilistic atmosphere but in a more symphonic way. Back we go to the prolonged agony and suffering. There isn’t much scope here as this dismal, tortured world isn’t going to suddenly get happier. In fact, Moon seem to want to make us revel in the dark monotony, if “Hollow Transcendence” and the following gloomy piece “Wormhole Wounds” are anything to go by. “Wormhole Wounds” develops into a reflective walk through these scenes of wilderness, with the drum setting a constant pace. After a spot of cosmic ambience that is “Absorbing the Pandimensional Gnosis” we come to the dissonant disorder of “Winds of Shattered Glass”. Where in the middle section of this album, we seemed to be floating along in terrifying nothingness, this one is louder and more confronting in its discordance and echoes, not to mention the black metal style of the drums. The echoing voice hisses at us like a monster coming out of its shell. Everywhere there is gloom. Lots of gloom. And here there is the threat of violence.
Atmospheric this certainly is. I’m not sure that you need an occasion to listen to this or any music, and I’m not averse to Blut aus Nord with whom I could draw a comparison, but I have to say that I found “Pandimensional Gnosis” drawn out and difficult to engage with.
(6/10 Andrew Doherty)
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