Posted in Whathaveyou on February 15th, 2023 by JJ Koczan
Released in the waning hours of 2022, Time//Wounds (review here) feels like an especially bold album for Mos Generator in terms of style. Yeah, the Port Orchard heavy rockers led by prolific madman guitarist/vocalist/producer Tony Reed have long since delved into progressive sounds, but never with such a surety of purpose as they do on their latest work. It’s not about “going prog” or something like that, like it’s 1974 and all of a sudden a what had been blues band sounds like Yes or some such, but about incorporating a new range of scope to Mos Generator‘s well established penchant for songcraft and melody. Not the kind of record a band would make out of the gate, rather, it is the beneficiary of the years and decades of experience of Reed in and out of the band as well as the chemistry he shares with bassist Sean Booth and drummer Jono Garrett.
They’ve settled down touring for the last several years, even since such a thing became possible again, and fair enough for how hard they went from around 2014-2018, but as they take more chances on this record, it’s satisfying in a way to see them meet with success on the listener end. That would seem to be what’s underlying this announcement of a second pressing of Time//Wounds since, inevitably, the reason they’re making more records is because they sold through the first pressing and think people will continue to buy. No doubt that’s the case, and bonus for fixing typos in the lyric sheet. As someone who regularly corrects spelling and grammatical errors from, say, a decade ago, on this site, I find it easy to appreciate that kind of thing, frustrating as it is that there’s no shortage of them wanting correction.
In any case, good for Mos Gen, and though it’s only been about three months since the record came out, you know Reed will have something new on tap for this year as well, whatever form that might take.
Here’s the band’s update:
Hello friends. For those of you who didn’t get a copy of Time//Wounds on vinyl before it sold out or you just like to collect different versions of the same record…the second pressing of Time//Wounds arrived at my door yesterday and I’ve put it up in the store. 200 copies on black vinyl.
It has the same audio as the 1st pressing but there are many changes to the artwork layout of the second edition (including the fixing of MANY typos on the lyric sheet). We’ve been getting some amazing feedback on this album and we truly appreciate the support of people buying it and letting us (and the social media public) know how they feel about it.
Mos Generator: Tony Reed: guitar/vocals/mellotron Jono Garrett: drums Sean Booth: bass
Posted in Reviews on December 2nd, 2022 by JJ Koczan
Time//Wounds is the fifth album since Port Orchard, Washington’s Mos Generator returned from the ether of hiatus with 2012’s Nomads(review here). The second era of the band is now longer than the first, as and as six tracks of Time//Wounds — issued through Music Abuse and Pale Wizard Records following a trilogy on Listenable Records in 2014’s Electric Mountain Majesty(review here), 2016’s Abyssinia (review here) and 2018’s Shadowlands (review here) — time matters.
Accompanying this return to activity in terms of full studio LPs has been a glutton’s delight of short releases, splits, self-bootlegs, unearthed demos, one offs, a solo album from founding guitarist/vocalist/keyboardist/producer Tony Reed, as well as several other Reed-inclusive side-projects, including Big Scenic Nowhere, Constance Tomb, Hot Spring Water, in-depth work with Australia’s Seedy Jeezus as producer and player, and more besides. As stretches of time go, it’s been a good one to be a Mos Generator fan.
Since Electric Mountain Majesty and particularly across recent EPs like 2019’s Spontaneous Combustions (review here), 2016’s The Firmament, and even the demos that showed up on their 2020 split with Di’Aul (review here), the band have moved in multifaceted fashion toward a more progressive approach from their foundation in more straightforward classic heavy rock. True, they’ve never lacked ambition, and they’ve done strongly thematic work before such as the concept album The Late Great Planet Earth in 2005, but particularly as Reed has grown more comfortable with various synth instrumentation and worked to flesh out his own vocal arrangements, the direction the band — completed by Sean Booth on bass and Jono Garrett, whose contributions aren’t to be minimized in how these recordings sound; I don’t know their dynamic in the studio, but it’s safe to say nothing is ending up on a Mos Generator record that Reed didn’t approve even if for diplomacy — but 20 years on from their self-titled debut (reissue review here), Time//Wounds seems to complete a turn toward a vision of performance-rooted progressive heavy rock that is both classic in substance and very much Mos Generator‘s and Reed‘s own.
Influenced by a deeper knowledge of original-era heavy and prog than one could ever aspire to amass, as well as his own roots as a player in more punkish fare — looking at you, “Getting Good at Revenge,” which reminds of bit of Mos Generator doing Fu Manchu at their own most punk — and indeed the work Reed has done as a songwriter to bring the band to this point, the 43 minutes of Time//Wounds carry something of an exploratory feel for the finished versions being created using what were the demo tracks for the songs.
This process has been a more than a year long front to back, and accompanying the rawer underpinnings is, instrumentally and vocally, the most complex material Mos Generator have released. To wit, the Opethian bridge(s) of partially-acoustic second cut “(Don’t) Wait Until Tomorrow” or the 14-minute finale “Until We Meet Again (Parts I-IV),” which indeed plays out structurally in movements flowing one into the next. That these moves take place alongside the prog-funky keyboard in “Burn Away the Years,” which is almost garage rock in its strum, is emblematic of the stylistic sprawl brought to bear under the heading of Time//Wounds. King Crimson, Motorpsycho, MC5, Beatles and who else? It doesn’t even matter since it all comes out as Mos Generator anyhow.
That, as it happens, is a major unifying factor throughout the songs. Another is an abiding sense of melancholy — certainly present in the cover photo by singer-songwriter Conny Ochs as well — that’s present from the less-than-thrilled-sounding opening verse of “Aja-Minor” (premiered here), “…Don’t lose your time/You ain’t got none…,” onward. Immediately, the engagement with time is at the forefront, and by the time the hook comes around with layers of Reed almost taunting himself, “Time wounds/What you got what you got in your head/N-n-nothing,” the inevitable connection between temporality and mortality is writ large without being said at all. If this is Mos Generator confronting death, they do so in almost manic but inherently still plotted fashion.
Time is almost everywhere throughout — “(Don’t) Wait Until Tomorrow,” “Burn Away the Years,” the also-linear-structured just-under-eight-minute penultimate track “Only Yesterday,” which likely starts the side B stretch-out that continues in “Until We Meet Again (Parts I-IV)” and feels born of a similar process. Shadowlands was likewise not without its darker streak, and I suppose one might say the same of the preceding records in this era of the band too, to some degree or other, but the contrast born with Time//Wounds is striking. Some of these melodies, tones and grooves are bright and near-soaring, and they carry with them an existential weight that goes even beyond the more intense shove of “Getting Good at Revenge.”
It’s not necessarily a pall this casts over Time//Wounds, but it’s a shadow in the tapestry. And as Mos Generator adventure into new ideas in terms of their sound as a unit and in Reed‘s songwriting, the seemingly lighthearted strum of “Burn Away the Years” — “Never give in and never look back at the smoke” — and the churning layers of synthesizer and guitar that ensue want nothing for clarity of purpose. It is Mos Generator growing older, weirder, but maintaining the surefootedness of craft that has always been a an essential component of the band’s work. Time wounds and time heals in “Aja-Minor,” and the lyrics of “Burn Away the Years” seem reluctantly reconciled to being “another birthday song,” but even if the album holds a scope that can feel disjointed at first glance, there’s always a course charted beneath the surface, and on the most fundamental level, the songs are too thoughtful and intricately made to be anything other than progressive rock.
I expect some listeners won’t know what to make of it — even longtime followers might be surprised — but those who find themselves able to invest properly in the mission and the message here, a record that seems to describe the urgency of its own making even before the first track is done while also stretching out in ways the band never has before, will find it nothing but a triumph. That won’t be everybody, but it will definitely be some, and with what Reed, Booth and Garrett conjure in these tracks, I feel like Mos Generator have never been less predictable for what might come next. Especially given their history, let alone the fleeting nature of all things, that in itself seems worthy of appreciating. This is the output of a master of the form refusing to not challenge himself. In other words, the way art moves forward.
Mos Generator will release their awaited full-length, Time//Wounds, on Dec. 16 through Music Abuse Records and Pale Wizard Records. And as I tell you it’s been four years since the Tony Reed-led, Port Orchard, Washington-based heavy rock trio released their last album, 2018’s Shadowlands (review here), understand that the count of years comes with the caveat of a steady stream of EPs, remasters, compilation appearances, live recordings, side-projects from Reed and sundry other one-offs. I’ve said on multiple occasions that Tony Reed — joined on Time//Wounds by bassist Sean Booth and drummer Jono Garrett after briefly reuniting the original lineup of the band this year for a couple live shows; wonder if they were recorded — has a work ethic that I consider deeply inspiring on a personal level in that he wakes up each morning and hits it. These are the levels of productivity to which one aspires.
Time//Wounds states its central themes plainly, and “Aja-Minor” (premiering below) arrives as the opening track and the leadoff for a deeply progressive and intricately arranged collection of progressive but classically structured heavy rock. Songs like the acoustic-led “(Don’t) Wait Until Tomorrow” and the subsequent melodic roller “Burn Away the Years” lay out the premise in lines like, “Until it’s over, never look behind,” etc., amid intricate fuzz and fluidly arranged keyboard/Mellotron. I’d be surprised if “Getting Good on Revenge” isn’t released as a single after “Aja-Minor” since it’s a rocker and the component barn-burner, setting up the more extended reach of “Only Yesterday” and the 14-minute “Until We Meet Again,” parts of which, if they came from Belgium, would probably be hailed as groundbreaking post-black metal but are nonetheless a grand unfolding that is distinctly the band’s own in that it is executed with a surprising lack of pretense for something that’s both so long and so grandiose in style.
This is basically an album announcement — SO HEY, there’s an album coming! Here’s a song off it! I sincerely hope you enjoy and look forward to having Time//Wounds as a late highlight for 2022, because that’s exactly what it’s gonna be.
Some comment from Reed follows the song below:
Mos Generator, “Aja-Minor” track premiere
Tony Reed on “Aja-Minor”:
Like many of the songs on the Time//Wounds album, Aja-Minor is about time and the decisions that are made as the years pass by. I feel like the lyrics are a message to the young telling them not to waste a moment in this life. Musically, the track goes through many changes and it’s hard for me to pinpoint direct influences, but I think the initial spark for the song comes from the fact that I am using a tuning that Joni Mitchell uses on her Hejira album. Using that tuning allowed for chord voicings I wouldn’t normally use and helped to create a piece of music I’m very satisfied with. I think it’s a condensed representation of the rest of the album. Progressive rock with pop elements.
From the album “Time//Wounds”. Coming December 16th on Music Abuse Records (vinyl) & Pale Wizard Records (cd)
Mos Generator: Tony Reed: guitar/vocals/mellotron Jono Garrett: drums Sean Booth: bass
