Are Moin a band? They’re three individuals who play music collectively and write “songs,” so technically, in all probability, sure. However the trio’s method to composition is lopsided, wonky. They aren’t splatter-paint artists, not fairly, however they’ve a slash-and-burn method to what’s primarily rock music. Maybe that’s as a result of two of the band’s three members have spent a lot of their music careers not making it.
For the last decade previous Moin’s debut album in 2021, Tom Halstead and Joe Andrews had been lively because the digital duo Raime. The music they made was moody and rectangular, stark soundscapes with speedy percussion and interjections of haunted synthesizer. Their music was darkish, serious about texture greater than rhythm. They had been extra techno-adjacent than techno. Their 2012 album Quarter Tones Over a Residing Line options recordings of string devices deconstructed and reconstituted atop a mattress of business grumbling.
So it was quizzical if, on reflection, not stunning when, three years in the past, they rekindled a short-lived alliance with the powerhouse drummer Valentina Magaletti as Moin. What had been these heady digital dudes doing enjoying round on guitar? On the group’s debut, Moot!, we received the reply: They had been doing simply that—enjoying round. And thank God for that.
Moot! is probably the most typical of Moin’s three albums, a (comparatively) straight-ahead instrumental post-hardcore file. With a grayscale tone and guitars that howl like wolves, it could have been a pure extension of Raime’s sound had been it not for the addition of Magaletti—a prolific, boundaryless participant, with expertise in improv, home, pop, and extra. Her asymmetrical percussion rhythms had been the album’s defining function. Whereas Halstead and Andrews had been noodling away scientifically, she seemed like 10 subway bucket drummers enjoying all of sudden.
On their second album, Paste, the group added extra pronounced vocal samples, to nice impact. A spoken-word snippet by author Lynne Tillman, saying {that a} man hung up on her, is mesmerizing, disorienting, positioned towards a woozy drum beat and plinky guitar. One other tune, “Forgetting Is Like Syrup,” features a slowed-down vocal pattern that ultimately disintegrates with a cassette-jammed-in-the-tape-deck impact. The album is bizarre and haunted, much less linear than Moot! however extra substantive.
You By no means Finish by some means strikes each nearer and farther from the middle. There’s extra glee, much less terror. The songs slither. It’s a stretch to say there’s common rhythm right here, however some songs do dance. “It’s Messy Coping” by some means sounds as very like techno because it does Fugazi. “C’mon Dive” makes use of a chopped-up, high-pitched vocal pattern the way in which a jungle tune may, and ups the ante for Magaletti’s roiling drums, which sound as colossal because the Hoover Dam. It’d be a bizarre DJ that might play this tune, however a DJ nonetheless.