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Review & Video Premiere: The Moth, Hysteria

the moth hysteria

[Click play above to watch the premiere of The Moth’s new video for ‘Empty Heart.’ Their album, Hysteria, is out today on This Charming Man Records.]

The Moth engage in an almost singular pursuit of scathing rawness with their third album, Hysteria. Issued like its predecessor, 2015’s And Then Rise (review here), it is a 10-track/36-minute collection that, even when it departs the death-infused thrust of songs like opener “Empty Heart” and the subsequent title-cut to flesh out its slower-rolling doomer impulses on side-ending pieces like “This Life” and the finale “Jupiter,” still retains more than an edge of the extremity at heart behind that pummel. Guitarist Freden Mohrdiek and bassist Cécile Ash share vocal duties, and the resulting approach is by no means amelodic, but even compared to the release before it, Hysteria finds the Hamburg outfit making a decided turn toward harsh sounds and harsher vibes; a brutality captured with a live-in-studio feel and punctuated by two drummers: the returning Tiffy and newcomer Christian “Curry” Korr.

The latter percussionist is a recent arrival, and even with a pair of drummers swinging away and the Sunlight Studios-esque tone Mohrdiek displays after the false start of “Hysteria,” the dominant position, hands down, belongs to the bass. Hysteria as a whole is eaten by low-end rumble, serving in some ways as a reminder of how mishandled bass has been over the decades in extreme music, all but cast out of death and black metal and classic thrash or otherwise relegated to root notes or following the guitar. Ash‘s low end is a significant force in the overarching weight of this material, and as that’s true amid the grunts and chants of “Slow Your Pace” as in the nodding and catchy highlight “Brachial” — also screaming and bludgeoning — just before. It becomes a defining element.

One gets the sense that, much like the overall push into nastier sonics itself, this is something done with the utmost purpose behind it. Hysteria is the third The Moth long-player behind And Then Rise and the preceding 2013 debut, They Fall, and while it doesn’t provide a next clause to that seeming sentence-in-progress between the first two titles, that very fact is telling of a will to try something new that is manifest throughout. There are still shades of High on Fire and heavy thrash extremists Mantar to be heard in the onslaught of “Blackness” or “Empty Heart,” but aside perhaps from bringing in the fourth band member, the change in presentation is the biggest shift from one release to the next, and at this point, The Moth have enough quality work under their collective belt to assume consciousness behind the decision rather than a happenstance of recording situation.

the moth

When it wants to, Hysteria meters out a vicious stomp, but to hear the cone-blowing brown-note low-frequency heft at the beginning of “Loose” is to understand how essential the bass is to this mission. Beneath the fluidity of vocal arrangements between Ash and Mohrdiek and a moment’s readiness to transition in pace between and within tracks like “Brachial” and the part-punk “Fail,” which is the shortest inclusion here at 2:27 and the lead-in for “Jupiter,” the longest at 5:15, and amid waves of riffs and drums that are no less at home in maximum propulsion than they are lumbering through “This Life” and the closer, the bass is what most ties the album together. There are times, in fact, at which it feels like there’s no escape from it, and while the material itself is structured into verses, choruses, bridges, ending sections, etc., that consumption lends an experimentalist sensibility to go with their root approach.

This only makes Hysteria a more exciting listen. It is a sonic curio, almost. Plenty of bands have indulged in having two drummers, from the Melvins to Kylesa and well beyond, but even as The Moth put themselves in these ranks, it’s the change in sound itself throughout Hysteria that seems most to convey their creative drive. While not necessarily a radical departure from where they were two years ago, it nonetheless demonstrates a basic willingness to manipulate their own tendencies, and whether The Moth take it as a cue and move forward in a similar direction from here, pushing into even more extreme fare while balancing that against their melodic underpinnings, or opt to try something else entirely their next time out, the clear statement that Hysteria makes is that such turns are well within the scope of their ability and dynamic.

Further, while the title of the record speaks to a (gendered) sense of the unhinged, it’s worth noting that front to back, MohrdiekAshKorr and Tiffy never actually seem to be out of control of the proceedings. There are certainly moments of blemish, but like leaving that false start in at the beginning of the title-track, the simple fact that The Moth make no attempt to cover these is telling further of the naturalism at heart in what they’re doing. Organic extremity? Free-range aural destruction? Whatever you might want to call it, Hysteria takes this balance of style and production and turns it into an aesthetic that belongs to The Moth more than anything they’ve done before. It is the result of a band willfully taking the lessons from the work they’ve done in the past and learning from them to craft something new. It just so happens that that something new is an absolute monster.

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This Charming Man Records website

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This Charming Man Records on Instagram

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One Response to “Review & Video Premiere: The Moth, Hysteria

  1. Dave #1 says:

    Fuck, this is awesome.

    Fuck, this is heavy.

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