Soft Moon


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The Soft Moon (2010) , 7.5/10
Zeros (2012), 6.5/10
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(Clicka qua per la versione Italiana)

San Francisco's one-man band Soft Moon (Luis Vasquez) debuted with The Soft Moon (Captured Track, 2010) in a vein reminiscent of the gothic new wave of Sisters Of Mercy, Ministry and Suicide. The tribal, witchy Breathe The Fire is his Temple Of Love (Sisters of Mercy), the breakneck industrial pow-wow dance Circles is his Where You At Now (Ministry), the gloomy cavernous threnody Out Of Time is his Ghost Rider (Suicide). They are wrapped in atmospheric synth lines, excoriated by Killing Joke-ian bass lines, and metabolized via sudden tempo shifts. The polyrhythm of Parallels merges Caribbean and Australian flavors before a Neustyle "motorik" beat takes over. Sewer Sickness ups the ante by intersecting a siren-like guitar with a babbling vocals at a hyper-boogie pace that is even more Neu-ian. Dead Love maintains the galloping beat but veers towards the mellower tones of Joy Division. The throbbing electronic current keeps fueling undeterred the apocalyptic guitar swarm of We Are We and the cosmic psychedelic Gong-ian wails of Primal Eyes, the two noise-fests that crown the parade of horrors.
The detours from the standard are no less unsettling. The lyrics try to emerge in the slow ballad When It's Over but are immediately submerged by farting electronics. The booming drums of Into The Depths awake a reverbed spaghetti-western guitar melody. The most traditional song, Tiny Spiders, is a litany from hell that packs an impressive amount of hopelessness.
These glacial, mechanical, danceable aberrations of music constitute the ideal soundtrack to dystopian visions such as Constant Nieuwenhuys' "New Babylon".

The four-song EP Total Decay moved more decisively into sci-fi terrain, with Total Decay evoking early Chrome and Devo, the alien motorik Repetition turning into a metallic jungle orgy, and the post-techno dance jam Visions for synth winds and tribal drums crowning the dystopian vision.

Zeros (Captured Tracks, 2012) delves into doom and gloom but does so in a more predictable manner. The industrial voodoobilly Machines, the hiccupping frenzy of Remember The Future and the robotic Sisters Of Mercy-esque Die Life are good as background dance-music but ultimately forgettable because they build too little on top of the rhythm. At best, they may be used by better producers for creative remixes. Nonetheless, there are moments of great pathos: Zeros, this album's best tribute to dark-punk (with a guitar staccato borrowed from Peter Schilling's Major Tom), the dreamy dirge with massive distortion of Insides, and the haunted African tribal music of Want that singlehandedly redeems any derivative moment.

Luis Vasquez died in 2024.

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