Luna Azure have been around since 2010, so this isn’t some new band finding its feet. ‘Philosophy of the Skull’ arrived in 2023 as a ten-track album running close to fifty-five minutes, with Voices handling vocals, guitars and keys, Brandon Gabriel on bass and Michael Tan on drums. The album was independently released, with the recording, mixing and mastering handled at Zeppelin Studios for part of the record, while tracks five through eight were recorded at The End of Recordings.
After all those years, you would expect a certain amount of development. Instead, what we get is an album that seems to confuse being primitive with being good.
Luna Azure throw Black Metal, noise, Doom, crust, ambient passages and various experimental ideas into the mix, but genre jumping doesn’t automatically make something adventurous. A lot of this record sounds like ideas being thrown against the wall and left there. The guitars are repetitive, loose and often lacking the kind of riff development that actually gives a song somewhere to go. There is a difference between hypnotic repetition and simply repeating something because there isn’t another idea available.
The raw production is another matter. Nobody here is asking for some polished modern Black Metal production where every drum hit has been cleaned until it sounds like a highly repetitive typewriter. Raw underground recordings can have character, atmosphere and plenty of aggression. But there is a point where raw becomes poorly defined, and ‘Philosophy of the Skull’ crosses that line more than once.
The drums don’t help much either. There are sections where the loose playing suits the primitive approach, but elsewhere it sounds like the performance itself is struggling to keep the material together. The vocals are suitably harsh and buried into the overall sound, although they rarely provide enough personality to pull the weaker compositions out of trouble.
The ten-minute ‘The Smiling Sun’ is a good example of the problem. There is plenty of room here to build atmosphere and develop an idea, but length by itself doesn’t create atmosphere. The same applies to the ten-minute ‘Welcome Back To The Medieval A.D.’ There are interesting moments buried inside both tracks, but they are surrounded by enough repetition and wandering that you start wondering whether the material was actually finished before it was recorded.
‘Eunonia’ at least gives you something lyrically confrontational, attacking consumerism, money and organised belief. Fine. The subject matter fits the band’s darker worldview, but once again the delivery doesn’t have the musical force needed to make the point hit properly.
And then we come to something I personally want to put straight because there has been an incorrect connection made between Luna Azure’s Nekrolich and my own band.
I am the founder of Zvshakon and I will state this clearly: Nekrolich was never a member of Zvshakon and never played a single note for Zvshakon. He was considered at one point for a separate project that never happened. At that time, based on my own experience with him, his playing simply wasn’t up to the level required for that project and the idea went nowhere. There was no Zvshakon membership, no recording, no rehearsal contribution and no performance.
That’s the actual story.
I mention it because the Singapore underground is small, and history shouldn’t be rewritten simply because somebody was once considered for something that never materialised. Being discussed as a possible participant in a project does not make someone a member of a band.
Back to the record.
There are moments where Luna Azure show that they can actually create an atmosphere. Some of the slower passages have a strange, uncomfortable quality and the experimental side occasionally works better than the straight Black Metal sections. The problem is that these moments are buried beneath too much unfocused material.
The album also has a presentation that does absolutely nothing to help it. The artwork and overall visual approach come across as crude rather than genuinely disturbing or underground. Primitive artwork can look fantastic when there is a clear idea behind it. Here it often gives the impression that little thought went into how the record would actually be presented.
And this is where the whole ‘extreme oddities’ approach starts wearing thin. Being odd is easy. Being experimental is much harder. You need composition, control and enough musical substance for the strange elements to actually mean something. Otherwise you’re simply listening to a band refusing to edit itself.
Luna Azure have been doing this since 2010, so the usual excuse of being a young band finding its direction doesn’t apply. There is obviously a genuine desire to explore different sounds and move outside conventional Black Metal boundaries. That’s respectable. What isn’t so respectable is releasing material where the weaknesses are so obvious and then expecting the raw aesthetic to cover them.
‘Philosophy of the Skull’ isn’t completely without ideas. There are flashes of atmosphere, some interesting lyrical themes and occasional passages where the experimental approach actually works. But those moments are not enough to carry an album of this length.
For me, this is a record where the concept sounds far more interesting than the finished product. Luna Azure want to be strange, primitive, experimental and outside the usual rules. Fine. But underground credibility doesn’t come from simply ignoring the rules. It comes from producing something strong enough that nobody gives a shit about the rules in the first place.
‘Philosophy of the Skull’ doesn’t get there.
After more than a decade of Luna Azure, I expected considerably more than this.
