2024 Repress
Moin's debut album came out in 2020, which seems too long ago to me but is apparently correct. Before the dust has had a chance to settle on that one here they are with another. I'm not complaining. Recorded not long after the release of Moot!, you might be tempted to consider Paste the other half of the same whole, which is kinda true and kinda undersells this latest bracing collection. The principle approaches that defined that first album remain intact - drum loops, obscure spoken word samples and delayed guitars combined in a way that essentially sees electronic music production techniques dovetail with (post-)hardcore energy - but where that record was defined by an almost surgical precision, Paste feels wider, more spontaneous, branching out further from its astonishing rhymtical centre . And that shift allows for the introduction of new subtleties and avenues of exploration. The album centrepoint one-two of In A Tizzy and Knuckle tell the story of the record, the former an abstracted, sample-heavy digression that feels like a cut 'n' paste rendering of Dead C and Jandek, the latter built round a burned out, pedal-riding early 90s riff that would have razed 120 Minutes to the ground. Sure, Moin never let you forget you're a body, but they also know when to zone in on the grey matter. By deftly traversing the spectrum of alternative guitar music, they're able render it in their own image, and in doing so mostly defy easy categorisation: post-punk/post-hardcore/post-rock are all half-right and not quite right enough, though the idea of being after everything else feels apt. Past-referencing, future-facing, post-everything guitar music that adds new possibles where it often feels like there's very few left. And there's few as good as Moin right now, that's for certain. Sold out at source. And look out for some big Moin/WOE news towards the year's end.
