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The Gauntlet: Into The Moat |
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Into The Moat Album Review
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Tracklist
1. Century II
2. Empty Shell
3. Dead Before I Stray
4. Guardian
5. The Inexorable
6. Fortitudine
7. Beyond Treachery
8. None Shall Pass
9. Prolouge The To Campaign
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'Century II', a crunching instrumental groove loops its way into your subconscious, preparing you for the tonal tidal wave that is Into The Moat. The band excel at melding disjointed tempos with abstract patterns of time as they blow through the quicksilver speed 'Empty Shell' with tangles of riffs that branch off into teeming metallic ganglions. During this tracks spaced out break, a flanger is applied on the vocals to enhance the virtual weightlessness. The group throws a touch of jazz into 'Dead Before I Stray' as bassist Joshua Thiel rolls through rippling bass lines and Rob Shaffer and Kit Wray demonstrate sharp timing and fleeting fingers flying across their fretboards in order to offset and accent the crippling paced rhythms issued by Thiel and drummer Matthew Gossman. The vocals of singer Earl Ruwell IV alternate between gravely roars and neck clenching screams as he strives to bring the band's hypermath to a logical end. That end being some of the muddiest, thumping algebraic metal out there. One part Deicide and one equal part Mr. Bungle, Into The Moat marries John Zorn style scales with pounding rhythms and some of the most cranium bashing riffing imaginable. The stop-start death-jazz of 'Guardian' puts forth an enormous presence as Into The Moat rage through as Ruwell rages overtop of the group's chaotic instrumentation. It takes a couple of spins to catch the nuances of Into The Moat's songs. There's literally so much going on in some of these songs that a riff flies by, finding you're still thinking about it long after that and several other song parts have passed. In that aspect, the music of Into The Moat is akin to a really good mystery movie, you might have to go through it a few times to find all of the clues. The techniques that are employed by Wray and Schaffer in the band's various call and response passages show an incredible amount of creativity, as these players show not only a good amount of manual dexterity, but the songwriting sense to put each of these applications together in an envelope which makes sense. The songs do have a direction with a destination in mind, unlike many technical players that play in a complex fashion simply for the sake of doing so. Players that take this course find themselves with a lot of great licks, but the songs don't hold together. Fortunately, you won't find that problem on this album, as with 'The Design', this young group has created a gargantuan record filled with fantastically heavy songs that will simply bludgeon you with a wall of cacophonous force. Are you extreme enough for Into The Moat?
Review by: Erin Fox
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Comments
ChadWiK - 2006-03-02 10:34:57
I think this Cd is very good. They really FUCKERD Shit up into it. I Like there style!!!!! |
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