Review of Absentia Lunae - Historia Nobis Assentietvr

Absentia Lunae’s second album delivers modern, fairly technical black metal with a progressive tint. With extremely fast drumming and eerie, dissonant riffwork, these guys are certainly capable of conjuring a chaotic and unsettling atmosphere, but the strength of the songs themselves is slightly less consistent.

While the rhythm section is very active in all five of the main songs, the riffs themselves are mostly fairly straightforward tremolo affairs, and are occasionally repeated for longer than I would deem necessary (“Condemning The Rationalism” comes to mind). The vocals, on the other hand, are perfectly executed throughout, contributing a demented series of shrieks and howls that sounds ideally suited to the band’s schizophrenic attack. There’s also the occasional clean singing or grim bass interlude, which serve nicely to break up the flow. On that note, I definitely got the most out of this album by listening to the whole thing in one sitting; the depraved vocals and disturbing riffage achieve an almost Blut Aus Nord-like atmosphere of sinister strangeness when given the chance to properly sink in.

While I enjoy the originality and crazed feel of Historia Nobis Assentietvr, the constant hyper-blasting of the drums can be tedious and some of these riffs are deceptively shallow. The production is also too clean for my tastes, with the aforementioned drumming sounding like it would be more at home on a technical death album, and the intro piece “Neuropa Calling” is way too long and doesn’t really serve any purpose to the album as a whole. Still, Absentia Lunae are great musicians who have the potential to deliver some groundbreaking black metal in the future. As of now, while this is definitely a record with more positives than negatives, I would sample before you buy.

Release Details

Absentia Lunae

Historia Nobis Assentietvr

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