It’s a common trope to call music genre-bending, but the reality is that very little of it actually succeeds in sounding novel. On their latest album, Paste, Moin prove themselves to be one of the few groups working today that can manage this trick. Tom Halstead and Joe Andrews, two thirds of the band, have played together in different projects for nearly a decade. Last year they officially revived the Moin moniker, turning it into a trio with drummer Valentina Magaletti and releasing a stellar debut album that drew as much from post-rock as it did from post-hardcore. Less than a year later, they’ve followed it up with an even more adventurous sophomore effort that manages to pull off the nearly impossible: they contort guitar driven rock into something that sounds genuinely new.
Having grown up with 80s and 90s rock, there’s something instantly nostalgic about the sounds Moin draw out of the guitar; it’ll sound like the wiry punk of a Fugazi record one moment and the atmospheric post-rock of Slint or Godspeed You! Black Emperor the next. Yet as you sit and listen to their compositions unfold, you can hear these sounds bent and twisted into thrilling new shapes. Both Halstead and Andrews grew up on electronic music, and while the influence isn’t overt it feels imbedded into the way they build these tracks. Their compositions are less traditional songs than extended grooves, ever shifting textures built atop a solid rhythmic core. Fragmented spoken word passages drift through, always posing more questions than answers. Even the most narrative forward track, “Hung Up”, tells the story of a steadfastly unresponsive conversationalist on the other end of a phone line. It’s never explained why they repeatedly choose to terminate the call; we’re left to face the same deafening silence as the narrator.
Not everything works for me; for instance, the sparse atmospherics of “In A Tizzy” lack the propulsive force that drives most of the album forward and create a bit of a mid-album lull. But even when the music doesn’t feel like it’s firing on all cylinders, it sounds like little else out there. Moin take big swing after big swing that land more often than not, building something that sounds genuinely new out of the familiar.