(Here is DGR’s review of a new album by one of his old favorites.)
Having a retraceable history with a project is always fun. Holding up the hourglass of time and attempting to gaze backwards through it is a fun way to hold oneself accountable, or as has more often proven to be the gaze, to serve as a cattle prod to the memory centers to let one know how you felt about a previous few releases. It is grounding in that way, having an artist’s releases serving as particular stopping points in time that you can center yourself on and remember the many years back. The musical adventures of the decidedly non-metal electronics and heavy metal guitar instrumental work of The Luna Sequence has been one such project.
This is a musical venture that has been mentioned in some form or another for a hair over a decade since your’s truly has set up camp in the corner of the site’s vast musical catacombs. The Luna Sequence has traveled with artist Kaia Young across the country and through multiple genre influences, absorbing ideas like a sponge and slowly adapting itself around them. It has seen permutations that have been aggressively heavy, surprisingly relaxed, introverted and meditative, and more often than not some unholy combination of all of the above depending on which ideas might’ve excitedly crashed into each other to form an energetic explosion.
Largely driven by a melodic keyboard line or otherwise synthesized instrumentation working in combination with an increasingly chunky guitar, The Luna Sequence has amassed quite the collective of music to its name, with the newest album, the late-January release of Rifts Become Passages, awakening the project from a decent period of dormancy to stack another solid release into the collection.
We mentioned it early on, but The Luna Sequence is a project that has seen multiple eras and phases throughout its existence. It’s hard now to even remember when your dearest writer here jumped aboard the train – save for seeing the name pop up in a few remix contests – but this is a project that has at times played with world shatteringly heavy guitar, pleasant keyboard lines, and synthesized orchestration in about equal measure. The Luna Sequence has danced across all genre bounds in chase of different artistic pursuits and the resultant effect is that latter-era Luna Sequence albums have always felt like three to four worlds crashing into one another, and the result of any particular ‘sequence’ is what survived the collision in the head.
In the case of more recent albums, those lines have blurred, perhaps finally highlighting an effective synthesis of all of The Luna Sequence’s different influences over the years. They’ve congealed into a recognizable form, such that Rifts Become Passages feels like a natural progression from its now three years older sibling I Only Remember Falling. There’s no sudden jump or leap forward but instead a natural step into new undergrowth and an assurance within twenty seconds of “Abandon The Shallows” that, yes, this is still very much the electronics and hard rock collision that is a Luna Sequence hallmark.
That isn’t to say that there aren’t some fun curveballs thrown the listener’s way in “Abandon The Shallows”. The Luna Sequence has never struck as a project content to sit on its laurels, so when the guitar effects start getting slightly more demented and warped in the mid-section of the song, you’ve then stumbled into the heavier side of The Luna Sequence’s coin flip. In what will become a recurring theme throughout the entirety of Rifts Become Passages, the melodic line of the song dances and flutters above a turbulent main songform underneath it. The combination of the somewhat out of place yet coldly meditative keyboard or other electronic effect alongside a guitar and drum battle that rips its way through various hard rock and heavy metal and head-on metalcore classic riff work has been key to the band for some time now.
“A Path, A River, A Door”, for instance, sounds like one of the more ‘classically flavored’ The Luna Sequence songs with swelling orchestration for its whole three some odd minutes, but it also has a very prominent guitar lead, which is a new element that has only reared its head a few times prior and usually accompanied by more aggressive instrumentation. “Absence In Artifice” constantly rings its way through, like a hallway of echoing chimes that has let a drummer try and hammer a kit into ash to change up the sound. By the end of the song, every element of the track is pushed all the way to the forefront and closes out sounding surprisingly chaotic.
Likewise, later on in the album you’ll get some solid double-bass drumming to propel songs forward – “Less Light Remains” may be the most forwardly heavy song of the gathering here because of it – and chunkier guitar work in “Starving The Overgrowth”. As mentioned above, as The Luna Sequence has effectively blurred the lines among its multitude of ideas, it has also been freed from having to designate some songs as ‘the heavier song’ and some as the lighter ones. Instead we’ve landed in the era of all of its elements combined, and so many of the songs on Rifts Become Passages travel along a pathway of heavy orchestral swell into climactic moment into thundering guitar.
Openings like the industrialized mechanism of “Empty Hand Of The Architect” serve as surprises as you travel deeper into the album, because the now-familiar suite of effects gets shoved to the wayside by new contortions on the electronics front, and yes, some actually straightforward heavy as hell guitar. It may be of the beatdown chugging variety but it is blended well with the earlier-highlighted orchestral swells, massive keyboards, and equally gigantic guitar lead that once introduced on “Absence” rises up again and again like an undead spectre refusing to let go. The duelling ghosts are speaking equally across guitar and keyboard work by the the time Rifts Become Passages reaches its final moments.
Its a welcome sight to see The Luna Sequence active again. For as constant as its output was in the early goings to the more spread-out release schedule of nowadays, it is still impressive that so much of that core sound as been retained. Even when elements of it are recognizable in other projects – such as Invocation Array, the duo that Kaia is also a part of – there are few willing to take as wild a swing at this particular sound as The Luna Sequence does. It may be that over time no one has wanted to try and combine that particularly opposed set of influences or it could be that due to being around so long, maybe The Luna Sequence is the only one that truly forged that sound into something all its own.
Rifts Become Passages is nine songs of big musical waves that all end up swelling very high before crashing down by the end of the song. They do fall into a recognizable groove around the halfway point but the fun of Rifts Become Passages comes from seeing just how each – now recognizable – segment of the overall machine will be combined into new form in a new song. There are still pleasant surprises to be found within Rifts – like the aforementioned album closer “Empty Hand Of The Architect” – but it is probably the most natural sounding sequel to an album that its older sibling I Only Remember Falling could’ve asked for. You’d never even guess there was a three-year gap between them, just that one was an angrier side and the other a little bit colder but about as aggressive.
We said it early on but we’ll happily cycle around to it here: Rifts Become Passages makes for a solid addition to the overall Luna Sequence collection, and hopefully inspiration remains as vital this time around so that we’re not waiting as long between releases again.
https://thelunasequence.bandcamp.com/album/rifts-become-passages
http://www.facebook.com/thelunasequence