Style: Black metal, dungeon synth
Primary Emotions/Themes: The violence of the night takes over as the blood moon engulfs the land
Thoughts: Some genre's of music are intimately linked to each other. Dungeon synth and black metal are two such genres. It can be argued that the dungeon synth genre was birthed out of the second wave of black metal in the early 90's (it can also be argued that it came out of Berlin school music as well, but that's not important here). Celestial Sword pays homage to both of these genres at once with their second album Dawn of the Crimson Moon.
Dawn of the Crimson Moon mixes raw (sometimes painfully so) black metal with dungeon synth in more a symbiosis than the two styles being distinct from each other. Of course there are points where one genre will dominate over the other, but I don't think that this release is what it is without the two genres being married to each other the way that they are here.
This is best exemplified in the first three tracks of the album where the songs are ordered to showcase the gamut of the entire release. Dungeon synth creates a fitting introduction to the album. Slow, dark and brooding is the melodies that come out of my speakers. This transitions into a dungeon synth piece that is accompanied by some guitars, a merger of the two style present on the album if you will. Finally the band explodes into ear piercing black metal. The production is painfully primitive and the vocals especially demand attention. This is all wrapped up as the dungeon synth takes over once again at the end of An Endless Death Beneath the Corridors of Wallachia on the fourth track.
This is the cycle of the music for Celestial Sword, one style bleeds into the next effortlessly and by the end of it several rounds have been made of each genre and just about any combination of the two that can be imagined. Dawn of the Crimson Moon isn't a fantastic album, but it does flow well and it scratches a certain itch that few albums in my collection can.
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