Astral Luminous - Lunaric Tide (2009)

Astral Luminous is an ambient/black metal project from Texarkana, Texas, USA lead solely by multi instrumentalist Scott Johnson. At forty minutes in length and consisting of four songs, ‘Lunaric Tide’ features two ambient songs and two lengthy black metal compositions.

The album opens with the title track, which is a nearly four minute ambient piece that carries a very cosmic sort of spacey vibe to it, which certainly lives up to both its title and the bands name. The second song, ‘Astral Luminous’ clocks in at thirteen minutes and continues in a black metal style. While the music does contain the traditional trebly raw rhythm guitar that many black metal bands employ there is also a lead guitar which plays some absolutely beautiful and clean sounding melodies which are both very dark and melancholic in character, but regardless very pleasing to the ear. The bass guitar is even audible at times and some acoustic guitars are also used at the end of the song, which really allow this one to end on a positive note. The vocals, although limited, are actually handled by a session musician and while they are somewhat typical grim raspy black metal growls they do at least fit the music fairly well.

The third song, ‘Binaural Vibrancy’ is another epic at just a little under thirteen minutes, but this song I find takes the music in a much darker direction and generally eschews some of the melody from the previous song as well as the more sorrowful tendencies in favor of a misanthropic approach (at times). The final four minutes of this song then conclude in a sort of ritualistic like ambient manner. The final song, ‘Cosmic Death’ is a ten minute pure ambient piece, which is dark and droning and sort of gives that vibe of just drifting endlessly through space or some sort of celestial void at least. Trippy stuff indeed.

After some time, I’ve come to realize that this is quite a good release, though I think the vocals could stand to be slightly more original and perhaps adding at least one more black metal song wouldn’t have been a bad idea either. I honestly wouldn’t mind seeing a cleaner production to bring out all the melodies clearly, but what is done on this album certainly works fine. Lunaric Tide offers up some excellent ambient/black metal music here and it really will be interesting to see what Scott comes up with next.