Luna Mortis
Progressive metal with radio polish on The Absence
Selena Salfen
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Metal often lets people have it both ways, fusing low-end hardware that grinds faces into the dirt and bombastic cadence that yearns for myth and poetry. Singer Mary Zimmer helps Madison band Luna Mortis (who play tonight at the High Noon Saloon) swing between these two tendencies, swooping up into lofty melodies one line and clawing into her guts with an enviable, rhythm-gnawing death-gargle the next. The band began as The Ottoman Empire and released an album, The Way Of The Blade, under that name in 2006. Luna Mortis recently made its debut on a bigger scale, though, signing to international metal label Century Media for its recently released album The Absence.
Zimmer, songwriter/guitarist Brian Koenig, and producer Jason Suecof seem to have engineered a strategy for making that voice work. For all her versatility, Zimmer’s never low enough to get muddled up with the rhythm section, never high enough to conflict with Koenig and Corey Scheider’s guitar leads. Then again, The Absence’s 10 songs succeed because the band as a whole stays focused through some abrupt U-turns. “Reformation” opens with a respectable death-metal shudder. Then, with basically no transition or padding, it pumps into the kind of windy, FM-friendly hard-rock chorus that proves windy, FM-friendly hard-rock choruses can still be good.
It helps that The Absence’s production values actually tighten up the band’s sound instead of just putting a new finish on it. While it’s sometimes hard to tell one spiraling flurry of notes from the next, the band’s guitar attack builds up the suspense of songs like “Phantoms” and wings “The Absence” off on some brief tangents before plunging it back to the guttural chorus, grounded in Zimmer’s powerfully wretched rasp. The Absence doesn't skimp on either of its extremes, and it inspires hope that musicianship and ambitious songwriting may yet mop up the airwaves with Chad Kroeger’s scalp.
Luna Mortis, "Reformation"
