Moonloop Archives - NO CLEAN SINGING

(TheMadIsraeli wrote this review of the new album by the Spanish band Moonloop, released in March.)

Moonloop are one of those bands whose existence feels like a justification for the underground metal scene. I’m not talking about underground in the mainstream sense, of course — not the Suffocation’s or the Immolation’s of the world — but the really obscure “you have to be a sad sap who does nothing but scour the Internet for cool album art and weird-sounding band names to judge your listening off of” sort of underground.

We’ve sorta mentioned Moonloop on this site once or twice back in 2012 courtesy of posts Islander made, but we haven’t ever given these guys their due and just coverage, and their newest record Devocean, which came out back in March, is as good a place as any to start. Continue reading »

My fucking day job forced me to be away from my computer most of yesterday. It was like a severing of the umbilical cord between fetal me and the mother web who gives me the sustenance of new metal, except no one slapped me on the ass to get me breathing on my own. This morning I was able to reconnect the umbilical and re-establish blood flow to my brain, although oxygen deprivation may have caused some brain damage. With me, it’s difficult to tell, because I come up with bad metaphors even at the best of times.

Anyway, I started catching up with metal news over the last 24 hours by browsing my Facebook news feed. I stopped when I came to a Listenable Records post about a band called Moonloop. I stopped because they are called Moonloop. How could I not check out music from a band named Moonloop?

It turns out that Moonloop are from Barcelona, Spain, and Listenable signed them last month for release of their second album Deeply From the Earth, which will come out in Europe on May 28 and in the U.S. sometime this summer. I found one of the songs from the album on Soundcloud. It’s called “Strombus”, and I dig it deeply.

Listenable says Moonloop’s music will appeal to fans of Gojira and Opeth. References to Gojira and Opeth in the description of other bands’ music are over-used (I’m certainly guilty of it myself), though in listening to “Strombus”, I can sort of see the connections. The structure of the song, the combining of harsh and clean vocals, and the incorporation of progressive musical elements could call Opeth to mind. And I suppose there’s a certain elephantine stomp in the guitar tuning and chord progression in parts of the song, along with the timbre of vocalist/guitarist Eric Baule’s voice and the environmentally themed lyrical focus, that could explain the Gojira reference. But as I heard other songs from the album, I also thought of Cynic and Obscura.

Regardless of which references might best capture the feel of the music, “Strombus” and the other two songs I found are definitely worth hearing. Continue reading »

MOONLOOP: “DEVOCEAN”

MOONLOOP