Full Album Premiere & Review: Moon Coven, Sun King
Posted in audiObelisk, Reviews on August 22nd, 2023 by JJ Koczan
[Click play above to stream the premiere of Moon Coven’s Sun King. It’s out Friday, Aug. 25, on Ripple Music.]
Swedish four-piece Moon Coven return with their fourth full-length, Sun King, collecting nine songs and 46 minutes of material that continues the band’s progression into the niche between niches. Their third album, 2021’s Slumber Wood (review here), brought them to Ripple Music after their 2016 self-titled (review here) came out on Transubstans, and found them solidifying their approach between classic heavy grooves and psychedelic or jammy impulses. Sun King isn’t a complete departure from this method, but in the fuzzy tone of “Wicked Words in Gold They Wrote” and “Behold the Serpent,” or the centerpiece “Below the Black Grow” with its plotted guitar leads later on, “Guilded Apple” coming across with a rock that seems just to want to skate and is way more San Diego than Malmö, and the closer “The Lost Color” feedbacking into its heavy garage thrust, Moon Coven — David Regn Leban (guitar/vocals, also cover art, production, mix), Axel Ganhammar (guitar), Pontus Ekberg (bass) and Fredrik Dahlqvist (drums), plus Joona Hassinen, who mastered — put their focus on songwriting and let the rest shake out as it will.
In the case of the sunny cultism of “Seeing Stone,” that shake is palpable, Moon Coven coming off the Fu Manchu-style riffery and blown-out Fuzz-in-the-woods vocals of “Wicked Words in Gold They Wrote” with a more straight-ahead shove in one of Sun King‘s standout hooks and a cut that, along with side B’s “The Yawning Wild” at 4:24, is one of the shorter inclusions at 4:32, sounding like potential Euro tour partners for their labelmates in Sun Voyager as they careen and crash and ion-drive their way through good-time cosmism and heavy vibes for heavy times. And I don’t know if Leban is looking for production clients, but with as full and dense and professional (for what it is) as Sun King sounds, he’s going to have them lining up soon enough if he doesn’t already.
Yeah, the bridge from Black Sabbath‘s “Children of the Grave” is recognizable after the midpoint in “Wicked Words in Gold They Wrote” and something about the swing and holding-on-by-a-thread looseness of the penultimate interlude “Death Shine Light on Life,” maybe the lead guitar tone, brings to mind All Them Witches, but beyond these and other superficial comparison points — a riff here reminding of another riff there, and so on — Moon Coven‘s purposes are more intricate than they’ve ever been. The quiet opening of “Behold the Serpent” and the doomly unfolding of its crash-laced nod riff sprawling out give over to a march of a verse with a deceptively complex melody in its low-end fuzz complementing the vocals, a second voice layer kicking in for the chorus/title-line before they shift back to the verse.
These structures are traditional, and stylistically at least, one might call Moon Coven traditional as well, but while they’re obviously schooled on the aesthetic foundations from which they’re operating, at this point they’re also coming on a decade’s remove from their first LP, 2014’s Amanita Kingdom, and that they’d be mature in terms of craft as they are shouldn’t be a surprise. Part of why it is one is because they still sound like a young band.
To listen to “Sun King,” the song itself, its fuzzy cosmic biker boogie is executed with suitable, palpable live energy — which it needs; credit again to Leban as producer as well as player — and it moves into and through its bass-and-drums-hold-the-rhythm-while-the-guitars-line-up-for-slow-Thin-Lizzy-style-soloing, the magic of the two guitars working together highlighted briefly before a sudden and righteous return of the chorus. It is not impatient, nor wanting urgency, and its last lyric, “The turning of the tide if coming/Let’s behead the king,” feels like it’s speaking to real-world concerns through metaphor — though actually Louis XIV of France, aka the Sun King, died of gangrene — in a way that is neither overbearing in stating the obvious message that economic disparity is a bad thing, nor shying away from making the comment at all.
Like a lot of what Moon Coven do, it is a question of finding the place on the balance from which one might manipulate multiple sides. A bassy highlight in its early going, “Below the Black Grow” has a languid fuzzy rollout in its verses and a solo section answering back to the title-track in how it winds into the chorus and makes its way through to finish with a return of that easygoing-feeling fuzz, almost Brant Bjorkian for its just-right tempo and abidingly cool vibe. “Guilded Apple” tucks a dream-shimmer solo away in its second half as its ending, but its six minutes are more defined by thrust and the smoothness of the shuffle happening amid the momentum carrying Moon Coven into “The Yawning Wild,” which is all about the fuzz and the winding lead that cuts through it. They have the riff, they know they have the riff, you know they have the riff, so here it is. And when you have that kind of riff, you don’t need anything else. That they realized it is further evidence to support their maturity, but it’s not really in argument.
Feedback caps “The Yawning Wild,” as one would hope, and the instrumental “Death Shine Light on Life” picks up with a subtle push thanks largely to the drums, which assure that the spacey guitar that might just otherwise lie down and relax a while keeps moving toward “The Lost Color.” The finale echoes some of the Californian twist of “Wicked Words in Gold They Wrote” or “Seeing Stone,” but has its own gritted-out intention before its solo closes like “Guilded Apple” earlier on; an ending that one might call understated if not for the song in question. “The Lost Color” certainly has a crescendo, but its payoff is for itself rather than the whole of Sun King, and maybe that’s a fitting representation of the record too, since it’s the songs that have led the way all along.
An accomplished creative process wrought with discernible care, attention and a mind toward continued growth, Moon Coven‘s Sun King signals that the four-piece have no interest in settling into easy categorization or resting on past laurels. It is an immersive but not numbing listening experience, and moves with sneaky grace derived from the band’s collective persona. Perhaps most of all, it rocks, and maybe that’s enough to ask of it.
