Once, black metal arose from a desire to offend, bringing spiteful and furious bitter sounds in its path. The premises of an unbound and primal form of music created fertile ground for completely free artistic development that sought to jiggle with traditions and unremittedly confronted approved with disapproved, known with unknown and convention with innovation. What came forth was a flamboyant parade of diverging styles, ranging from the epic to the raw and primitive, from the overtly melodic and technical to the minimalistic, from the avant-garde to the electronic and drone-inducing. While lots of people consider black metal to have had its best moments, up to this point now and then bands still emerge from the dark side to completely overwhelm black metal fanatics with original music. Apparently, Luna Ad Noctum stand at the twilight trying to figure out how these acts actually succeed in doing that. While struggling with concepts like ‘imagination’, ‘uniqueness’ and ‘artistic vision’ they get mystified, give up and fall back on what they seemingly perceive as the pinnacle of sinful violence.

While zealously riffing away they successfully manage to completely avoid any of the constituents that might have justified their blasphemy leaping out of the rehearsal room and into the studio. They faithfully choose to chastise humanity with plain and straightforward inoffensive, mediocre compositions, following predictable structures, breaks and leads we heard a thousand times before and vocals that are absolutely sleep-inducing.

Picture a band combining the worst aspects of Dimmu Borgir, Limbonic Art and Cradle Of Filth, producing lame riff-feasts without any sense of ambience. The frustrating point however might really be that this is one of those bands that do not fail to deliver a steady song, play tight and are even able to surpass a chorus-verse-chorus arrangement, making it hard to deny them the right of existence. But they should be, because what Luna Ad Noctum at Theme III ultimately comes off with is a clinical assembly of some of the traits of mid-‘90s black metal, but not the spirit, not the conviction and certainly not the desire to be different. Offend they do, and Norway probably has one or two black metal villains left that would be happy to punish Luna Ad Noctum for being as life-affirming as they are.

To add insult to the injury, the promotional material speaks of ‘unconventional’ and ‘eccentric’ and unashamedly pretends the band stands at the dawn of a new style of metal, coined ‘lunar black metal’. Well, since they put the words right into my mouth, I can actually relate to that; if you compare the current black metal scene to the vast universe, with numerous bright stars being born, gracefully dying or exploding, forming an endless congregation of beautiful and ever-changing constellations and galaxies, Luna Ad Noctum represents that big, dull and comatose lump of matter called the moon. Briefly visited and subsequently shunned as useless some decades ago.