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Moloken: Our astral circle

16/11/09 || Habakuk

↓, ↘, →, punch!
→, ↓, ↘, punch!
↓, ↘, err….shit. I got the other two down, but how do you do the Moloken again?

Shitty band name aside, what kind of Sonic Boom do these four guys from…let me look that one up…ah, Sweden (where else) have in stock on their debut? Something doomy. Which is something I could’ve told by looking at the cover alone. That one is pretty rad, by the way.

We are greeted by an enjoyable and reasonably heavy production and a bass sound that wouldn’t be out of place on a Blood Red Thwaahhnnnng album, in that providing some nice underlying heavy boinnnggg. This is heavy doom, but not exactly of the funeral kind, so the overall tone is rather clean compared to the really dirty doomsters like Moss, Ahab or Evoken, and not exactly reverb-heavy in comparison. Compared to these guys, it’s actually quite fast, too, but still, “Our astral circle” is more a kind of Zangief-album. Slower than most others, and heavy. And without the cool special moves. When it gets close to you, it can probably wrestle you to the ground, but it has to catch you/your attention first. Which it doesn’t do with me, for some reason.

On the last song though, Gorbatchov comes in and everyone does the Russian dance. No, really.

Technically they don’t do anything wrong, these four Swedes. Oh wait, they do: If you have no problem calling three songs “Untitled”, fucken go all the way and make “EBEORIETEMET” number IV. Anyway, the songs meander and turn almost progressively, there are some nice twisted harmonies and simplistic one-string melodies on guitar in addition to the distortion carpets, skilled and tight drumming, the aforementioned prominent bass… all is well. Last but not least, the singer sounds adequately desperate, with a rather high but still guttural growl, and he doesn’t go clean on us, thankfully. Man, that took me some time with the latest Ahab. Worked fine after a while, though, but yeah, there’s nothing like that here. The metal-archives state some hardcore influences, but I can’t hear any, so I’d say we thoroughly file that under, you guessed it: bullshit.

So, why am I not happy yet? I can’t really say, but it probably has to do with “Our astral circle” turning to background music sooner than I can perform a Tatsumaki Senpuu Kyaku. I guess this is an album that needs to play on repeat throughout some steamy nights of err… Street Fighter to sink in, but so far, I just have to force myself to give it a go again, just because I could spend every minute of it listening to some Hyper Crush instead. Maybe I’m just not depressive enough these days. It’s all my fault!!

I’ll have to work on that, obviously. When I start, I’ll give Moloken another go. That might not happen too soon, to be honest, but if you’re looking for some new doom that’s not ultra-slow, disregard the score, this might be right up your alley. They deserve to be checked out by you, especially taking into account that this is their first album. For now, I’ll leave it at that and place Moloken in the jar for bad times or give them another go when they have the Flying Powerbomb down.

Sho-ryu-ken!

6.5

Information
Released: 2009
Label: Discouraged Records
Website: Moloken MySpace
Band
Ken Masters: vocals
William F. Guile: guitars
Dhalsim: bass
Edmond Honda: drums

Tracklist
01. Molten Pantheon
02. Untitled I
03. Die fear will
04. Followers
05. Untitled II
06. EBEORIETEMET
07. My Enemy
08. Untitled III
09. 11’‘12

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