TREPALIUM DOING THAT “MOONSHINE LIMBO”

We had a big collection of things that are metal but not music earlier today, so I thought we ought to follow that with some actual metal music — sort of.

We knew as long ago as November 2013 that the French band Trepalium were working on something that was going to swing. Back then we came across (and wrote about here) a short video clip of Trepalium guitarist Harun Demiraslan practicing a new song that seemed to be taking the band’s signature “boogie death metal” sound even more directly into swing jazz territory. Oh man, little did we know how far they would go…

Today Trepalium released a music video for a new single named “Moonshine Limbo” that put a ginormous smile on my face. It comes from a new six-track EP named Voodoo Moonshine that will be released October 6 by Klonosphere. Not only have the band dived head first into swing, they’ve backed it to the hilt with a brass section, which gives the song a big-band sound. It’s got one foot in the 30s and one foot in 2014, and a couple more feet straddling the line between swing and groovy metal, with harsh vox on top of the whole hybridized, multi-legged thing.

The video is also as much fun to watch as the song is it to hear.  At first, I wanted to violently shake those people in the audience for sitting there trying to play it cool in the face of music that makes you want to get up and jump. But as it turns out, all I had to do was wait a bit. If you don’t feel like getting up and jumping to “Moonshine Limbo”, you better check your pulse because you may have prematurely expired.

A doff of the hat to director Benjamin Cappelletti for a fine job on the video; his web site is here.

Voodoo Moonshine can be pre-ordred here. (Thanks to my NCS comrade TheMadIsraeli for tipping me to this video.)

https://www.facebook.com/TREPALIUMBAND