MOON AND AZURE SHADOW is a project created by the musician and composer Sean Yoshioka. The project has elements coming from the Japanese soundtracks and Atmospheric Black Metal. The project has recently released its newest album titled "Age Of Darkness and Frost" and that's what we are going to talk about.

The opening song from the album is "Across Dark Landscapes" and it's an instrumental song that has a great orchestral work, alongside nature sounds like crows and eagles. This song creates a good ambiance for the album and sounds epic. The title song "Age of Darkness and Frost" starts with an epic tense dark orchestral sound that grows slowly, until the traditional Black Metal vocals hits in with the blast-beats and the beautiful orchestral sounds that are sad and lonely in a way.

"Black Winged Gates of Destiny Descend" is the shortest song on the album and as the previous ones, it starts with an epic orchestral sound but this one has something tense on its melodies. "Abyssic Lunar Tower" is the longest song on the album with seventeen minutes and twenty-eight minutes' length. The song starts with the traditional orchestral parts that we have on this album and then the instruments hits in right with the aggressive high vocals. This song has a lot of dynamic as it starts calm, grows into something aggressive and then it mixes up the aggressiveness with the calmness from the orchestral sounds.

"Through the Channeling Souls" has a cool drumming on the beginning that supports the ambiance created by the instruments and there's also an electronic sound on it. The use of the piano was good here and it gave the song a new ambiance. "Unholy Vanquishing" has this tense and dark sounds that reminded me of Dracula's movies and it also has fast guitar riffs, blast-beats, aggressive vocals and calm parts where reminded me even of Power Metal ballads. "Passage Through Time and Cold" is the song that closes the album and it starts with a beautiful piano followed by some vocal choirs and orchestral parts. It also has the sound of the wind alongside the blacksmith working sound.

This is a good album and I believe that even people that aren't into Atmospheric Black Metal will enjoy this one. The songs are well written, the orchestra is beautiful and the instrumental parts were well executed. I just think that there could be an improvement on the production part, because sometimes the vocals, drums, bass and guitars sounds a little bit lower than the orchestra, which makes the experience a little bit hard to listen.