Artist: Moonlight’s Empathy
Country: USA
Label: Dark Adversary Productions
Formats: Demo CD
Year: 2025
‘Stalwart Servants Of Satan’ is the title of the debut demo of Moonlight’s Empathy, a new one-man project helmed by Eldrinacht, a musician that’s mostly known for his work in Ancient Necromancy, Cult Of Thaumiel, Black Funeral, Gharmelicht and a good couple of others. Given the quality of all of Eldrinacht’s musical achievements, it is highly unlikely that Moonlight’s Empathy is not going to fit in his legacy…
And, yes, after having heard this 20-minute demo a couple of time, it is fair to conclude that Moonlight’s Empathy sounds like a bit of all of those bands and projects blended together. Eldrinacht offers an interesting listen for people who are into mysterious and medieval Black Metal and aren’t put off by a bit of instrumental interludes that musically fall somewhere between suspenseful and spacey Ambient/Dungeon Synth and Neo-Folk.
It is actually not only the individual musical elements that makes ‘Stalwart Servants Of Satan’ a particularly exciting listen, it is mainly the way Eldrinacht weaves together all of those separate building blocks and creates something that wouldn’t sound out of place in the heydays of 90’s Black Metal. The full twenty minutes of music is lavishly decorated with spellbinding use of keyboards and medieval samples, making Dark Adversary Productions’ claim that these tracks are “nocturnal symphonies” pretty accurate. Yet, it doesn’t go fully into berserk-mode of the symphony-part, at least in terms of bombastic use of keyboards. Everything is fairly balanced and the result is impressively organic, so no plastic orchestrations or over-the-top kind of grandeur. In fact it reminds me most of a lot of those German Black Metal bands from the turn of the millennium that seemed to have been obsessed by medieval tales and mysteries and endlessly used samples of horses, battle fields and thunderstorms. Perhaps cliché for a lot of people, but for me it brings back fond memories. Memories from times that Black Metal was still mysterious and largely uncharted territory for my youthful ears.
