My Review: Motuvius Rex - Black Locust Grove

 Motuvius Rex - Black Locust Grove

Images pregnant with tension and magnetic flashes rise up, with an iron flight, from Louisville, Kentucky, to do magnificent damages, full-bodied and acidic, in the uncultivated crabgrass of our unconsciousness. Like a snake full of sand, ready for its meal, Mr Christopher Shahn Rigsby makes absolute prey of us. His weapons are two songs that come and anaesthetise our belief that before the power of dark hollows we can defend ourselves. In anticipation of the forthcoming LP The Vigilant Sower, the man with the epileptic beard haunts us and makes his mysterious realm justified. Visiting places denied to us, he teaches us about desolation and storm, misfortune and mental toxicity, with surgical precision and nail that break in his voice which is smoky but heavy as a slab of marble.

The Master of Disquiet arrives through the combustion of a rummaged and revisited folk noir, on the road to a funereal, immediate apocalypse, with minimal traces of the never-renounced Gothic Rock. But he has built a time machine and arrived, for us (of course), inside the square of a medieval town, greying and dusty. The heavy smells were dried out and put into an ampoule. Back in the present day, Christopher used them by throwing them into these scratched tears of his.

We stroll among Death in June besieged by cruel twists, Red Lorry Yellow Lorry as priests waiting to punish us, Fields of the Nephilim slaughtered by doubts that would like to kill Cthulhu and a chain of black angels moving inside our surrendered rosaries and crushed by polished, blunted stones, abandoned in our breath.

Two songs that now enter the descriptive pen of your frightened scribe.

Song by Song 

1 - Black Locust Grove

Deconsecrated photographs advance in the lapilli of redundant guitars, Christopher's voice invokes that of Chris Reed, for an immense virtual partnership, while the music moves like an hourglass on a windy day: ready to die, happily, as darkness stretches its hands inside the earthly creatures. Birds and snakes bow and approach our hearts. We dance to a syncopated, neurotic drumming, with the bass which is sovereign: it produces hammer blows, axe strokes that nonetheless are able to captivate, as in the master scene of the movie The Shining.

2 - Shattered (Full Gospel)

To think of a possible union between Death In June and Fields of The Nephilim seems like a gamble, the result of hallucinations frothing at the mouth. But it is true and right, and above all possible and therefore real: Christopher stages a recital where the delay of the senses is punctuated by sacred hand clapping, and the guitars are as dry as the blows on the keys of a piano in permanent decay. The melancholy precipitates into a bowl composed of flogged desires and the voiceovers make the track the scene of a movie full of stand-ins: we all know how dangerous it is to approach inhuman desires...

Alex Dematteis

Musicshockworld

Salford

3 January 2023

https://motuvius.bandcamp.com/album/black-locust-grove

https://open.spotify.com/album/0qiYMUUruih0NqsQXptdlY?si=RmbBaQ8-Q1CRcWLOVWPOAw