The Soft Moon: Criminal
It's been a while since I listed to some straightforward, Nine Inch Nails-esque industrial dance music, but Luis Vasquez, as The Soft Moon, embodies the genre's best qualities while avoiding any of its usual pitfalls. In a way, Criminal is a complement to Gazelle Twin's astounding 2014 record Unflesh, in that both use the trappings of techno and industrial to tell personal tales of anxiety, isolation, and private mental torture. One thing that obviously helps the proceedings is the fact that Vasquez's command over his instruments is impressive; on songs like 'The Pain' and 'ILL' he makes his banks of synthesizes roil and howl like past memories that claw at your brain...this is anguish that you can dance to, after a fashion. Listening to Criminal is a window into a very private, tormented world, and if it lacks the feminist tension of Unflesh, it makes up for it in a more general sense or tortured longing. We all have days where we need a record like Criminal that speaks to our own fears and discontentment, and in Vasquez we have someone using his own negative personal experiences to bring us an album we can all relate to.
Mamuthones: Fear on the Corner
And now for something completely different: Italy's Mamuthones are a bizarre, motorik jazz(?) group, and their album Fear on the Corner is one of those records that's nearly impossible to categorize. The closest point of comparison would probably be Faust, in the kosmische-inspired grooves and the amateurish vocals, especially on the pure krautrock grooves of 'Show Me'. But then songs like 'Cars' and the title track utilize instruments like marimbas and tribal style percussion to dip into the always-fertile fields of Eno/Byrne/Hassell style faux-ethnographer soup that sadly didn't make much traction in the weird world of '70s German experimental music, outside of maybe an Amon Duul album here and there. The album always starts to stretch way, way out at the end, with the twin titans of 'Alone' and 'Here We Are' taking up over a third of the total running time, feeling like leftovers from a recent Goat album left to bake and expand and grow rancid in the sun. Like Re-TROS, another band I hadn't heard of before who seriously impressed me, Mamuthones take their influences from a lot of different places, but blend them into such a unique porridge that they transcend the starting beats and become something wholly unique.
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