More high quality black metal from Italy! Absentia Lunae hail from Trieste, Italy, to be precise, and this quartet spins an icy whirlwind of progressive black metal that's right at home with the generally avant-garde aesthetic behind the Sol Invictus label. If the band's intricately assembled blasts of dissonant blackness weren't cool enough, Absentia Lunae also stand out as one of the few black metal bands that I've heard that have a woman in their lineup, and a lady lead guitarist named Climaxia to boot! She might have one of the coolest black metal pseudonyms that I've ever seen, but Climaxia is also a shredding riffmistress, which I already knew from hearing her awesome solo project Melencolia Estatica (which we'll have available here at Crucial Blast shortly). In Umbra Imperii Gloria has previously been released on limited edition LP on Serpens Caput Productions in 2006, and the music is intensely epic, blazing fast and complex like Spite Extreme Wing but with twisted atonal riffs and dark post-rock elements showing up in unexpected places. Songs move seamlessly between raw, aggressive blasting with speedy tremelo riffs and waltzy melodic passages, and there are tons of amazing, moving melodies all over this album, even when the drummer is blasting at inhuman speeds, and the drummer keeps things interesting by throwing in odd jazzy percussive patterns (often matched by equally jazz-influenced basslines), sudden tempo changes and weird shifts in time signature, often slipping into strange off-time rhythms. Cool vocals too, usually delivered in a hateful throat-shredding rasp but sometimes shifting into dramatic, almost operatic singing. And always, there are Climaxia's guitars, razorblade-sharp and trebly, slicing through Absentia Lunae's discordant blackness with ominous arpeggios, abstract chords and heartrending melodic figures, creating all kinds of otherworldly textures and alien riffs that the rest of the band deftly navigates. The melodies are so catchy and moving on In Umbra that I sometimes forget just how dissonant and off-kilter rest of the music is, but it's far closer in tone and feel to mathy, avant-garde black metallers like Deathspell Omega, newer Enslaved and (especially) Ved Beuns Ende than the more traditional Italian black metal that I've been listening to. Awesome stuff, and I'm most definitely looking forward to hearing more from Climaxia and company!