Bleep

If Moot! was an “experiment to experience”, then the latest album from UK-based three-piece Moin is a considered exploration digging deep into the memory banks. AD 93 gleefully crept into the world of rock with Moot!, and the grunge / rave fusions of IVVVO’s Bleached Butterfly; now only a year after their debut LP, Joe Andrews and Tom Halstead of Raime and prolific percussionist Valentina Magaletti return to the label, taking the language of alternative rock to new heights on Paste.

Not much is offered by way of explanation, rather it’s clear that Moin let the music do the talking. Andrews and Halstead started the side project in 2012, their split single ‘Elsie’ (with the multi-talented Pete Swanson) landed on Blackest Ever Black, followed by a self-titled EP the next year. It was a marked step away from their dark, instinctual breed of industrialised techno, a handful of metal-leaning post-punk tracks offered wordlessly and viscerally. The project lay dormant until eight years later, when the arrival of Valentina Magaletti signalled a brighter, more refined direction, and creative evolution both for Moin and their new home of AD 93.

With Paste, the refinement of the band’s sound comes to an all time high, an exciting prospect when their debut album was released just a year ago. Scuzzy guitars and live drums take centre stage in an examination of alternative guitar music, from indie pop to grunge with minimalist flair. The band’s cut and paste ethos is made evident in the impressionistic monologues of stitched vocal samples drifting throughout. Sourced from the likes of 80s spoken word compilations documenting the Los Angeles punk poetry scene, they add contextual colour to sonic collages that swing between sweet teenage nostalgia and manipulated chaos, reading like obscure film dialogues, eccentric interviews, and private messages left waiting in an answering machine, all cut up and slurred. ‘Hung Up’ is a clear example, its crystalline guitar harmonics punctuated by despondent strums and anxious, staccato drums, like a hopeful message transmitted down telephone wires ending in melodramatic miscommunication.

‘Forgetting Is Like Syrup’ takes this effect even further, constructing a musical and verbal map of abstraction with discordant guitars and vocals liquefied into a thick, caramelised solution, meanwhile ‘In A Tizzy’ sits opposite with a playback of wistful memories torn up by the fangs of nylon buzzes. In a particular act of juxtaposition, the warm distortion of gutturally blown out guitars on ‘Melon’ is painted in sunrise colours, yet sits behind words uttered with teeth bared.

Even without the context of these vocal montages, Moin’s performances are highly evocative: ticking percussion and molten bass mark the languid passing of time on ‘Life Choices’ and the similarly sludged out, vaporific ‘Sink’, while drums pace like careful footsteps on ‘Foot Wrong’, with harpsichord-esque guitar plucks adding to the tension. Trumpeting elephantine sounds and primal rhythms give the track an air of mystery, like spelunking in a deep cave where all of Moin’s disparate sources and inspirations lay in wait.

Though Moin’s sparse alternative rock palettes and electronic manipulations have been compared to legendary bands like Fugazi and Slint, their own experimentations come from a whole other angle, musically and geographically. Citing jungle and rave just as much as psych and post-punk, Paste cements the trio as exciting innovators in the new lexicon of modern rock music.