My Review: Man of Moon - Machinism

 Man Of Moon - Machinism

For several years now, new rivalries have appeared, problematic coexistences weighing down our existences, making individual and mass relationships extremely complicated. The advancement of technology, physical and mental immobility, and a massive dose of laziness are generating tensions that are impossible not to see and feel.

Some of this flows into the band Man Of Moon's resounding second album, a long-distance effort that allowed joy and awe to embrace each other in 2020, and that effect endures to this day: Dark Sea was one of the most significant debuts of recent years. 

And after four, Iain Stewart (the new drummer) and Chris Bainbridge (vocals, guitar, bass, electronics), offer a work that is perfectly attuned to the social themes addressed and to music that knows how to range in an over-the-top way, finding a way to give slight signs of continuity with the first work, but above all the will to create a sonic theme that specifies intentions and directions, an open-air laboratory, an investigation, a metamorphosis, a slow walk in the heart of fantasies and needs that are perfectly in sync.

It is a long look inside images, habits, of what has changed and brought to excess the need to place oneself constantly in the spotlight, with the consequent death of privacy, of deep thought, consigning everything to the merciless hands of the Market, with the old values exhaling their last breaths and the new ones being the prerogative of a new youth no longer able to remain connected with the older one.

The album is a scudding, gentle, sonic vice within habits, a highlighting of upheavals with a gaze that is the basis of atmospheres ranging between gloomy and cheerful: Chris and Iain do not want to deliver a resigned attitude but to be messengers endowed with strength, courage, removing dangerous and harmful spaces from hallucinations and extremisms. Music to educate, to seek a different contact to create conditions for improvements that can trigger new strategies, also through dance, an ancient system for compacting souls.

To do all this, the use of instruments, the same as in the debut, here finds the refined ability to extend the colours, the sounds, with the ability to channel thoughts into clear emotions, albeit also through an inevitable dose of drama. But you can hear the project, the intention that runs through the eleven episodes, to create a mood and a mantra that keeps the tension high, a polite scream that puts on those shivers capable of not leaving the listening mind impassive.

 Sensitivity grows, the shrewdness of using doses of rational implants that are not misunderstood, ensuring that the whole is an undeniable opportunity to make a portentous leap towards something not previously done, not necessarily to be defined but certainly to be experienced, creating the terrain of a novelty that makes behaviour unequivocal, giving a thrashing to the excessive desire for freedom, a leitmotif that in the end is the cause of almost all evil today.

Respect is exhumed, the pride of human intelligence that wants to reject artificial intelligence, even if it welcomes the latter, but establishing different boundaries. An extremely shrewd, profound work, so effective that it leaves one completely surprised, shocked, with at the end of listening the urge to say enough and roll up one's sleeves.

The compositions arrive on the epidermis and then enter the venereal circuits, the labyrinths of thought, the bones deciding fragmented but powerful dances, a continuous shaking without pause: it is certainly not the slowest songs that grant calm, because none of this exists in this thunderous album, which is nothing if not a gentle but impossible to stop avalanche on our part, resulting in a cry for the only necessary general present miracle, which is to be established in the awakening of consciousness, coming out of the poisoning and subsequent torpor.

The moon here is really split in two and the man looking at it must move, change perspective in his gaze, think about the survival of true wealth, the intact wealth, and be shaken by the rays coming from there, without any resistance. Increasingly isolated from the social context, the human being of Machinism can enjoy a thunderous and important concession: to see for real the distances, the sense of inner and outer space, and to seek within himself those capacities that make contact the only possible form of salvation.  The musical flows are the basis of important inspections, of genres that mingle in search of their own elevation, in an earthly circle where melody, harmony and rhythm live an intense twinning, delivering songs that, in addition to thoughts and dance, are able to console, to see the band retain their initial roots but with the great will to draw new plots, inspections, for those stylistic possibilities that confer, undeniably, massive applause. So many novelties, an ups and downs of sidereal ‘games’, inspections that end up delivering a truly miraculous framework, to make this art a resounding foothold, without smearing. 

The electronics live a new season, less separated from the rock/indie/alternative structure, for a union that puts down different roots, offers the hook for connections desired but impossible, before, to become a devastating reality. Iain enhances the rhythmicity, creating innovative spaces, able to join Chris's sonic prairies in a combo that envelops, sows new and different dreams that in a few minutes turn out to be real and credible, in a sensorial rush that enhances, perfectly, a genial preventive machination.  The bass and guitar are more united than in the debut, and the keyboard bases are less isolated, less conspicuous but more in keeping with a united message, which starts with what is listened to in its entirety, ending up with a complexity that slips perfectly into pleasantness. The main form is to diminish the desire for the verse and the refrain, to make the listener concentrate more on the signals, the sounds, the dynamics, the flows that seem to become matter, second by second, with a high control of the expressive structures.

The production, which is excellent, enhances a general sensation that is more intuitive than practical, a sonic non-concept album that seems to be so, to compact itself perfectly with the lyrics that are decisive, energetic, determined with paintings of poetic verses that enchant and surprise.   The first part of Machinism thrives on greater expressions of elevated rhythmic propensities, where speed is a methodical urgency balanced towards message comprehension. The second, where there is certainly no lack of rhythm and a certain sonic ‘aggressiveness’, appears to be an agitated sleep, a journey into dreamlike activities that must be interrupted as there is a task to be accomplished in a hurry. Perfectly uniting these two sections, it is immediately clear that the order of the songs has involved a good deal of rational work, for a result that highlights genius, skill and the identification of that cultural aspect that today's music seems to want to overlook. But the two boys from Glasgow have broad shoulders, an alert and brilliant intuition, intent on being not fellow listeners but the inspirers of new vitality, in an urgency pregnant with sparks and perfectly friendly moonbeams.

Let's arm ourselves with curiosity and dive into these eleven episodes: there is beauty waiting for us, with open arms, full of confidence...

Song by Song

1 - RISE

Landing on planet beauty begins with the band's immediately recognisable style, the long guitar sound that glues together a sense of friction that fascinates and shakes at the same time, and then off with a rock tribality that winks at barely hinted at electronic experimentation. 

Magnetic.

2 - YOU AND I

The third to last single before the release of this second album, it has the ability to give the singing mode the ability to capture the attention and then approach a form of expression close to less marked space rock. Dark, electric, sensual, the song takes us on a conspicuous leap in time, with the Seventies marking out how not many changes are needed to make a song interesting and worthwhile. In the finale, the atmosphere experiences splendid rhythmic alternations.

Sexy.

3 - SWIM

Initial atoms of Industrial and Ebm then become a torch contemplating sunshine and rhythmicity with the skin of psychedelia running alongside the beat, for a hypnotic dance that tattoos the short melody in the circle of eternity. Suicide would applaud, as would Front 242: from a minimalistic approach to an outdated era, Man of Moon colour instincts and drives with a riff that nails the wall.

Showy.

4 - VIDEO

In the penultimate single, we are thunderstruck by the perfect balance between rhythm and atmosphere, which seem like separate environments but with magical grafts that make us vibrate, giving us a feeling of great concern and melancholy, where reality is transported through this minimalist form of expression. With a tragic, frightening flavour, it could be the perfect soundtrack to an Akira Kurosawa film, as it allows fear to be an intelligent companion, using drops of Krautrock and shreds of psychedelia.

Devastating.

5 - TIME

It's up to the last single to define the maturation, the progression, the new visual and sensorial spaces that the band wants to manipulate, through a robotic form that contemplates a vocal that seems to cry without too much pain, giving us a strange sensation that is what makes us fall in love with this song, which is nothing more than a mysterious jewel that puts our time in disorder. 

Magical.

6 - THE TIDE

The initial approach takes us into the home of the Velvet Underground and then slowly escapes into the craters of a breathtaking suspension. With slowness, the duo's melody becomes an aurora borealis, an endless spectacle. And when a semi-acoustic track makes us magnets in a state of contemplation, then we can say that the band knows how to paralyse convictions, generating a splendid inner marasmus...

Hypnotic.

7 - IN THE WATER

Here's the combo that wrote the splendid Dark Sea reminding us of that album through a funnel of nerves miraculously held up by their charisma, by the undeniable ability to suspend atmospheres, to be the expression of a new melody in transformation, attaching a rhythmicity that drags without ever exploding.

Miraculous.

8 - REIGN

Neurotic, dramatic, explosive with style, a lunar beam coming out of its orbit, the song is a whiplash kissed by electric corals, an alternative that seeks links with electronics that appear but do not contaminate, to give the whole a feeling of modern sacredness.

Mysterious.

9 - MACHINE THAT BREATHES

The most incandescent tear comes out of magnetic notes of a piano that immediately makes us sink down and obedient, in order to listen to a sweet torment that springs from the whispered voice of Chris, here the magnet that stuns without any hesitation. It surrounds the senses with its almost resigned tone, a silken-gloved clap, transferring a pain seeking and gaining a sweetness as consolation...

Thunderous.

10 - RUN AND HIDE

Released in October 2021, the song knows a captivating retouching, a greater propensity for mysticism, a caustic prayer, an introverted preoccupation that arrives at the realisation of doubt about our survival, while the minimalist structure, with the final guitar to stun the bitterness, makes this composition the polar star that guides us towards our last chance of understanding...

Lunar.

11 - THE WILD

The greatest astonishment comes with the closing track, a genuflection that envisages an abnormal decadence, a vortex that resembles a hissing, with the notes of the piano keyboard (surrounded by a spectral synth that hypnotises the atmosphere) being a sad song that precedes Chris's, in a heart-breaking idyll, an outpost of a sadness that has no foothold but releases toxins in large quantities. A singing never before expressed, capable of being a swing in the wind, a going and coming back scratching our soul with a strange sweetness. Then its finale, chemical haze in transparency, offers us the ultimate punch in the face....

Ungovernable.

Alex Dematteis

Musicshockworld

Salford

18th May 2024

You can purchase it here:

https://manofmoonband.bandcamp.com/album/machinism-2

Written and Recorded by Man of Moon 
Produced by Man of Moon and Paul Gallagher 
Mixed and engineered by Paul Gallagher 
Mastered by Ryan Shwabe 
Artwork by Peter Kelly