Luna Ad Noctum was formed in 1998 and released Dimness’ Profound in their home country Poland in 2001. British Golden Lake Productions deemed this recording interesting enough to release it in the whole of Europe, and so they did. If I look at the combination black metal – Poland, I always imagine another album full of underground extreme primitive NS black metal (and most of the times this is true). However, L.A.N. takes a different approach as they refrain from using idiot Nazi lyrics and have incorporated keyboards into their sound.

It’s still pretty fast and extreme and luckily they don’t have a female singer (thank Go…uhm…Satan for that!) so it’s still metal all the way and decent metal it is. The tracks all sound familiar to someone acquainted with the genre of melodic black metal but everything sounds all right, no major original ideas but also no real weak tracks either.

Especially “Moonlight Sanctum” is catchy as hell. If you’d like to compare this band to others, I would say that old Hecate Enthroned, Dimmu Borgir and Emporer come close, although L.A.N. is more straightforward in their approach. The musical level of these guys is decent but expect no technical highlights; still their songwriting and playing skills are far better than the average black metal band. Production is average and delivers what you would expect. No disappointments there either.

The cd, like so many these days, comes packed with a video of the track “The Last Coldest Sunset”. A very effective video recorded with minimal resources but with maximum impact. From their website, I learned that they have already recorded their second album, which they hope to release this year. So if you like this one, there’s more to come.