Released:
Rating:
When a record makes you feel, it’s pretty spectacular.
Label: Sub Pop
Released: 2nd March 2018
Rating: ★★★★
Every album has the power to do something different to you. Whether it’s basking in joyous euphoria, reflecting inwards at the most delicate of lines or screaming at the world – if it triggers such a reaction then it’s done a pretty spectacular job. It’s in that world that Moaning’s self-titled debut lives, a record that doesn’t so much soundtrack as it does pull at the very notions of being alive in 2018. Through its darkness, the trio create a light-shining record that’s defiantly honest – not proclaiming to have the answers, but instead rips itself open with brutal confusion and vital questions.
Always asking and prodding at more, it’s an avalanche of angular cutting emotion, pulling to mind the outsider vibes of Interpol, Joy Division and The Cure. ‘Don’t Go’ is an immediate adrenaline rush of a single, and that blending of styles and allowing themselves to explore every avenue is nothing short of astonishing. The electronic-blends of the flickering ‘Close’, the rallying cry of desperation heard through ‘The Same’, the soaring realities that build on ‘For Now’ and the uncontrollable scream of ‘Useless’ are startling in their power, brooding darkness with youthful resistance to challenge it all. Jumping between mountain-sized anger into aching vulnerability, it wraps itself in a world that confronts everything head on and isn’t afraid to take the consequences.
When a record makes you feel, it’s pretty spectacular. ‘Moaning’ is a record that not only does that, but captures an entire generation’s angst and fears into one devastating bottle, finding the best way out of the dark is to scream in its face. An undeniably essential record. Jamie Muir
