Cyclic

Lunaris is a bit tricky to pin down. Their blend of death and black metal is resolutely a hop, a skip, and a dance away from being catchy or easy to get into. They also suffer from what that syndrome is where band members are in a self-imposed competition to add as many musical elements as possible, into every song. Once in a blue moon, and more often in the 2010s, it can work pretty well, especially in the technical death metal resurgence from 2016 onwards. In the case of Cyclic, it works pretty well, albeit not as well as it could have, if the record label or studio producer had really hammered down a few boundaries. If you like Arcturus, Paganize, Scariot, and so forth then you'll like Lunaris' least liked full-length.

The listener can expect tempo shifts every other bar, Spiral Architect-influenced wandering vocal lines, and pretty fast drumming full of odd meters and strange emphases, in all the wrong (right) places. Unusually, the bass gets a fair shake too, albeit mixed a little trebly; oh well, at least you can hear it rumbling away consistently, and there's quite a few fun glissandos also. The lead guitar work is also above average but sadly mixed more like a sonic element or a background composition item. If you're going to make everything else weird and blurry, at least let the shred stand out and do its thing as, and completely of, itself.

On the down side the influences you can hear on Cyclic sometimes get in the way of the genuine oddness Lunaris themselves create, but in a relatively small country like Norway it's probably inevitable all the technical death metal and eccentric black metal bands sound interrelated. Lessons in Futility is a stand-out track with a nice keyboard flourish and a more direct fast moving structure. Lunaris' best material is their streamlined stuff, and even their overpopulated material is above average. Cyclic is a low risk listen, because the negatives are only moderate criticisms, and when they actually hone in on what a song is meant to be, Lunaris' style is fun as heck. Actually it's sort of fun to count in when the next reference borrowed from another Norwegian band is going to appear. Good drinking game!

The title track is a little unfocussed, with vocal styles veering between Enslaved style croaks, and Ihsahn style spoken-word parts. As with all the songs on Cyclic, everything will change really quickly, and the dime-turns are many and plentiful. The drums are excellently played, full of fast double bass locked in with the bass guitar, and lots of blast-beats augmented with china-slaps, and ride-pings, the best way to do it. The keyboards swirl in and out expertly, especially on Slaves of Opinion, and the guitar lines are proficiently played and full of great riff ideas, and a certain number of Cynic style jazzy cleans. The vocals are great when clean, and maybe a bit too black metal for music that's only sometimes black metal, and heads off into prog and death metal territory several times a song.

Lyrically Lunaris deals with the human condition and social and political frustration. I suppose there's a bleak metaphysics going on here too. On When it Ends, we hear,

A funeral pyre for society
Suffer the fate of our natural progression
Enjoy the end while it lasts
The sweet sensation of evolution

Cyclic's production is decent but really with the density of music ideas it needed to be better than it is, and yes we can be sure their budget wasn't enormous, but you can always do the basic things like making sure everything sounds consistent from song to song, and make sure the kick drums are leading the way for each song. The guitars are quite sharp, a bit like the first couple of Anata releases, but the drums, though well-played and not sounding bad per se, could have been tightened up, and the bass while audible throughout Cyclic, is doing more than its place in the mix suggests, and you don't get to hear enough of it.

Altruismens Gravol, is longer than the other songs on Cyclic, and has spoken Norwegian, acoustic guitar effects, and a Hammond refrain. Finally Lunaris experiment with breathing room! The bass guitar is allowed to hold more attention, and a nicely late-80s guitar shred session unfolds, but typically nothing lasts long for Lunaris, and death metal chugging turns up sooner rather than later. Hold on! Here's the black metal transition! And so on.

So, overall, you can't fault Lunaris for filling every second of playtime with musical ideas, but sometimes the frantic eccentricity sounds forced, and the band's influences are sometimes too obvious. The production could be a tiny bit better too, to really allow Cyclic's collection of songs to become a coherent album. It's all a bit of a mess, but nothing falls below above average, and there are many, many very good or excellent moments, such as the more focussed rage of In Nothing, and the gentler fade-out of Mott Natt.