Mo*Te – Dusky Drunkard C25
Mo*Te, on a one-man mission to prove no one-trick pony be he. Though if some of the recent comments offered by yours slutbagly are to be believed, this has perhaps always been the case. First up, straight-up, balls-out, old school, feedback'n'screamin'(tm). Full frontal assault with the barest smidgeon of vocal processing, Nagura's big dick in your right earhole while in your left what could be the same dick burnt beyond recognition. If you've heard it before it would not have been via Mo*Te, vocal inputs of whose tend to be processed unto oblivion. First reaction, to be perfectly honest: one of trepidation. I mean, nothing satisfies like a good, stiff, blast of early morning hardness, but imagine a whole tape of the shit. Okay, easy now, trust in yours slutbagly and your reward will be six minutes of Opium Punch: lilting orchestral layers laying lush droning foundations- the Opium- over which gritty saturations seethe and slather- the Punch- saturations equal parts filthed gristle and white-hot scathe. Onto Side B and another shift in perspective. Without reference to the track title, "Side Order Dub", I'd have taken the darkened bass-line for grim, death industrialite, undercurrent, of the sort unheard since Rest Stop Entrapment and Needle Freak (1998, both). Into the darkened tide are launched a steady string of jagged, whispery, depth-charges, straining toward a harsher pe aesthetic before the promised dubby "thud-thud" drops into the mix and signals a harshening (if not quite funkening) of atmos: depth charges open wide to accommodate washes of seething white, broken at thirty second spacings by the doubled thud, aka the sound of my jaw hitting the floor- great stuff! The three-minute closing ditty, "?", may speak for itself. Perhaps something along the lines of "wtf was I smoking?" A single, clear, severely-pitched, tone contrasts with very subdued, low-end, sputter, thus to establish a mood both coldly clinical and mildly disturbed. Against this, sporadic slaps of shithawk squawk warble and waver at wayward intervals, thus to establish a mood of wtf. The net results do convince. No pony here, rather one who confidently bestrides a range of possibility with the legs of a blue-blooded thoroughbred. The spirit of experimentalism is certainly alive and well. Mission accomplished.
