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Lunar Aurora > Andacht > 2007, CD, Cold Dimensions (Digipak) > Reviews
Lunar Aurora - Andacht

Inspiring Dreams and Nightmares - 85%

nvathron, January 12th, 2008

I learned of Lunar Aurora from a friend who showed me "Elixir of Sorrow". I was blown away by tracks such as "Zorn aus Äonen" and "Hier Und Jetzt". Lunar Aurora has a very powerful and evil sound of their own by what I have heard. Nothing ,however, could prepare me for some of the work presented in this work. The production work is definitely the best Lunar Aurora has had by far. All the trakc s are really amazing but a couple definitely stand out to me.

"Glück" being the opening track might just steal the entire CD to be quite honest. For the first time, I actually sense a great Mjolnir (German NS) inspiration by the judge of male voices and keyboards. The drumming is just incredible on this song and flow perfectly with the riffs. The chorus is unbelievable with the male voices, keyboards, guitars, and all the other fixings to create an evil and overpowering sound.The song deserves a place in any body's collection of amazing black metal songs.

"Das Ende" is the ending track, of course, and ends definitely with a sound to remember. The track had been used to promote the album in a few live video ads online. Tretcherous howls can be heard from Whyrhd, Lunar Aurora's last vocalist. I cannot express how awesome the clean yet rough male shouting vocals sound. The flames through the storm never die in this work. It is definitely a great way to go out, like the review stated.

The band is currently inactive and leave only a minor possibilities and great hopes for they are definitely a defining and powerful sound in the black metal world.

Lunar Aurora - Andacht - 90%

AnInsidiousMind, January 7th, 2008

Lunar Aurora is a black metal band from Germany and originally started out as a brutal step from Emperor – In the Nightside Eclipse, but have progressed into an ambient black metal band. This album is a bit closer has a more sinister/dark and depressing atmosphere compared to their previous works in this style (Mond, Zyklus, and Elixir of Sorrow), but it works incredibly well.

The album uses ambient passes at the start of the some of the songs, yet also uses keyboards/electronics to create a bleak atmosphere from the fore ground of rumbling riffs and the attack of clean, lower growls, and shrieked vocals. The album is composed into six tracks that have a different approach, but all of the tracks keep the sinister atmosphere; also, the contrast between the riffing, drumming, and vocals make the dark atmosphere. The band can be playing a slow steel picked riffs, blasting drums, and clean vocals, which are all done in way to make smooth transitions through the songs. Though the album is a lot of droning by the guitars and drumming, there are parts kind of similar to Darkspace where a riff will come out and punch you in the face.

If you want to go on a dark voyage of about an hour, listen to this album.

90/100

Exactly what I was craving - 100%

Rabbi_On_Acid, November 8th, 2007

It's going to be be hard for me to stay objective and rational reviewing an album which has had such a profound effect on me and my view on black metal, my most-appreciated subgenre of metal for over four years now. This will all probably turn into an orgy of delirious worship. But then again, if any album or band deserves that, this is the one.
I'll first describe my discovery of this album's beauty.

I'd already heard a fraction of Glück quite soon after the album's release, but for some reason, I turned it off after a few minutes, thinking it sounded very different from what I was used from Lunar Aurora. I'd known the band for a little over a year, focusing mostly on Of Stargates..., Ars Moriendi and Elixir of Sorrow. I can't really remember why I thought this was so different. In any case it wouldn't be for another few months before I tried the album the way it's supposed to be heard.

But then, in June 2007, I decided to give it another chance. This time the setting was to be exactly right. I turned off the lights, closed the curtains, lit a few candles and a stick of incense, packed a bowl of weed and made myself comfortable. Smoking contently I turned on the album and let it all wash over me in the semi-darkness of my room through my huge-ass headphones.
This time, though it was still not what I expected from Aran & co. (in hindsight it might have been the palm-muted riffs that pop up here and there), I knew this was what I'd been looking for for a long time. I had become very disappointed with how boring and emotionally shallow bands like Gorgoroth and Satanic Warmaster really sound (to me at least) and was looking for something with more feeling, more individuality, more depth. This was exactly it. I let it fill my headscpace entirely, and take my mind away on whatever journey it had planned for me.
By the time Dunkler Mann came up I knew I'd never heard anything like this before. The song really scared me, yet made me feel extremely euphoric at the same time. It was almost a spiritual experience. At some point during the song I had to take off my headphones for a minute because it was almost too intense to handle. And the second half of Andacht was in no way inferior to the first. Such a dense atmosphere and momumental songwriting I had seldom encountered

As for the sound, what you can expect from Andacht is an exceptionally heavy, exceptionally varied slab of atmospheric black metal, with keyboard accents and samples in all the right places. The closest analogy would be Srontgorrth or Virus West by Nagelfar. It has six songs, all over seven and a half minutes long, all having an integrated intro with keyboards and samples. If you know Trist, Aran's dark ambient project, you'll know that these intros are actually scary, something which most other bands that try fail at. Each of the songs on Andacht has its very own identity, mood and atmosphere, and their own ways in which this mood and atmosphere is created. And each of these songs is interesting throughout its entire length. Not a single boring moment can be found. It's full of momunmental riffs, yet remains drenched in an arcane atmosphere. In contrast to a lot of ambient black metal, which often focuses on endless repetition to gain its hypnotic effect, most of the songs here work toward some form of climax, most obviously so in Findling and Das Ende. I could go into detailed descriptions of the songs themselves but I think you should discover it for yourself.

The lyrics are all in German, all somewhat abstract for as far as I could decipher. More personal, more detailed and more poetic than your average satanic, pagan or suicidal BM subject matter. There are multiple vocal styles at work here, mostly Aran's more than adequate black metal rasps, but also (especially later in the album) somewhat Aaskereia-like shrieks, and some sparse clean vocals and grunts.

Is there not a single flaw to this album, then? Well, maybe one could-have-been downside. For Andacht, Lunar Aurora have made use of a drum machine instead of a human drummer (I'm not exactly sure why, as Aran played drums on Zyklus). However, until I bought the actual CD and read the booklet, I didn't even hear they were programmed drums. And as a drummer I'm usually the first to notice them. They sound very natural, very real. So not even this is really a flaw.

All in all this album showed me just what black metal can mean to me if it's done right. For me personally, this truly is the most powerful, most beautiful, most fulfilling black metal album I have ever heard. And it hasn't lost any of its strength since that very first time I discovered its full glory. This is an album that anybody should experience if they are prepared to surrender to it completely.

It's all about the atmosphere - 98%

Arsenicum, June 29th, 2007

As you can read on the band page, Lunar Aurora is currently on hold, Andacht being the latest (and last?) album. What better way say goodbye (for now), with the masterpiece of their opus.

Andacht is definately one of the most eerie sounding black metal albums in my collection, with a lot of eye for details. Every song on this album is a masterpiece on his own, with the addition of subtile keyboards and soundeffects. For example: on Geisterschiff, you can hear the sounds of cracking wood, just as it would sound on an old rotten ship, masterfully integrated into the music. On Dunkler Mann, you can hear a child whispering at the beginning of the song: "Stay out of this one", and halfway you can hear the child being hacked to pieces without being a splatter/gore cliche. Throughout the entire album, it is the addition of the keyboards which complete the songs, without dominating the them.

As usual, the songs of Lunar Aurora on Andacht are quite long, and clock over 7 minutes each , with lots of killer riffs, shreeking vocals, interesting machine-like drums and subtile keyboards additions, as can be heard on the already mentioned Dunkler Mann. Next to this song, the absolute highlight for me is the song Findling, with one of the most evil sounding " choruses" in black-metal history.

Andacht certainly deserves some hours of listening as it will take some time to get into the songs. The album grows stronger and stronger with every listening session. And that is exactly the strength of Lunar Aurora. The album ends with the somewhat melancholic Das Ende, of which we can only hope that it will not be the last we will hear from this intelligent black metalband.