The Luna Sequence
Rifts Become Passages
self-released
One-woman Oakland act The Luna Sequence has had a clear sense of the musical aesthetic they’ve been pursuing since the project’s first release in 2009. Truth be told, checking in with The Luna Sequence’s new releases every couple of years generally reveals minor thematic shifts and technical progressions rather than wholesale rethinkings of Kaia Young’s style. The Luna Sequence offers a cinematic version of industrial metal quite distinct from commonplace presumptions about either root genre or their commonplace hybridization, and new LP Rifts Become Passages is a pleasant reminder of its technical prowess and harmonic colour.
Beyond its nature as an entirely instrumental project, listeners checking out The Luna Sequence for the first time on this missive will likely be drawn to how bright, clean, and decidedly energized The Luna Sequence’s electronics and rock elements are. Opting for brightly coloured, liquid synth programming which bubbles up with clarion tones and quickstep shredding and double-kicks which straddle the lines between djent, progressive, and power metal, The Luna Sequence eschew the sort of grime and distortion commonly found in attempts to fuse industrial electronics with metal. The clean electro-acoustic sliding fretwork of “A Path, A River, A Door” sliding back and forth atop icy yet resonant synth leads is a fair and representative sample of the sound.
Young’s skills in arrangement continue to develop, and half of the fun of Rifts Become Passages lies in tracking the structural interplay between synths and guitars while harmonics are kept aloft. The timbral trade-offs between them in “Absence In Artiface”, with the whole track building to a fever pitch in terms of density, belies the tonic hookiness of what could easily fall into an indistinct mess. Even in a comparatively ‘simple’ track like “Daughter Of A Dying Sun” the loping interjections of rhythmic blasts beneath its space trucking recurring guitar lead make its melodic payoff hit both harder and sweeter.
Again, all of these hallmarks and moods have been goals that Young has clearly been pursuing since her first releases nearly two decades past. As she continues to compose music for the most baroque of bullet hell games or multi-phase JRPG boss battles, go back to Underneath or They Follow You Home and you’ll be struck both by how The Luna Sequence’s mission clearly remains the same and yet also by how much more adept the project has become in achieving it on releases like this one.
