“We want the music to make you feel like you can move mountains with it”. So says one of the members of The Moth Gatherer. Patient build-ups, crashing worlds and five long tracks to explore these works put them in the murky world of their fellow countrymen Cult of Luna, not that this musical style betrays or should betray any form of terrestrial nationality. The deep and chaotic sounds which make this slab shudder are not bright, maybe a bit celestial but certainly not suggestive of light. As I absorbed “The Water that We All Come to Need”, I could picture musicians with their heads bowed, throwing themselves about and immersing themselves in this heavy depiction of the night. The patterns changes but not the mood. It remains heavy and borders on the industrial. The intensity mounts. It’s mechanical but has shape, power and impact.
Indistinct cries can be heard in the background amid the wall of noise. There is a pause for some post-doom reflection. The drums work as a metal heartbeat. “Intervention” slows down again. It is now melancholic and atmospheric. This is the trigger for a long and weary passage. I couldn’t call it dynamic, more hypnotic. This is broken up by interesting electronic patterns. “A Road of Gravel and Skulls” is under way. There is a violent explosion. This track is the most emotionally charged and probably the heaviest, most insistent and sludgy. It steps down. The vocalist growls wearily. The quiet mood turns to a slab of noise. The Moth Gatherer are very good at this. The mechanical flow of “The Womb, The Woe, The Woman”, which follows, is punctuated with an interesting and irregular riff going on above it. The bass is just thunderous. The mountain is being dislodged slowly. The onslaught comes from several angles. But an onslaught it isn’t as a jazzy section follows. Delicate sounds are then superseded by the onset of more heaviness. The Moth Gatherer use the time to develop their tracks and explore new worlds. Dark worlds, mind. “A Falling Deity” ends the album. It is a big slab with big chords and a guitar melancholically straining away in the background. This repetitive and funereal track ends classically, which I suppose was meant to be poignant but I found it rather strange in this feast of heaviness.
The problem with this album is that if you listen to a Cult of Luna or Neurosis album, you’ve heard this already or at least the spirit of it. What does distinguish this album is the experimentation and variation. I’m not sure if the mountain really moved for me though.
(6/10 Andrew Doherty)
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