ALBUM REVIEW: Adventures Across Hearth II: A Night At The Tavern – Moss Knight

The year is 1995, the sun is barely up and your parents are still asleep. You slink downstairs and boot up your SNES, the glow from the TV bathing your family home’s living room in a scratchy CRT glow. The music pulsating softly from your favourite game bleeps and splutters much like MOSS KNIGHT’s new cosy synth offering Adventures Across Hearth II: A Night At The Tavern, a warm, nostalgic adventure full of fuzzy 8-bit synthesisers and rich ambient textures with deep world building reminiscent of games like Chrono Trigger and Earthbound.

Welcoming the listener into the fantasy realm of Hearth through instrumental soundscapes, MOSS KNIGHT manages some impressively complex and immersive storytelling with a relatively limited sonic palette. The ambitious Canadian collective THE HEARTHEN RING, of which MOSS KNIGHT is a member, dedicate themselves to telling tales set in the vast land of Hearth, wordlessly ushering the listener into their world with nothing but lush synth textures and descriptive song titles. A Night At The Tavern tells the story of the titular MOSS KNIGHT waiting tables and overhearing boastful stories from the patrons of The Gold Oak Inn, painting a cosy picture of the tavern and the lands further afield that the customers spin myths about.

Introductory track A Young Moss Knight Arrives At The Gold Oak Inn, Prepared For A Night Of Messy Tables, Spilled Ales, And Nary A Dull Tale does an admirable job of setting the scene for the rest of the album with a soft, bitcrushed organ leading a bouncy melody over the sound of a bustling fantasy tavern. Although MOSS KNIGHT is clearly trying to elicit feelings of nostalgia for the 8 and 16-bit videogame eras, they also tactfully blend in more realistic ambient sound, giving both a warm, vintage charm and a more immersive, well-rounded experience.

While the album may stay grounded within the Gold Oak Inn, Adventures Across Hearth II: A Night At The Tavern takes the listener on a journey across the creator’s mythical world, from sun soaked fields to frigid mountain peaks and fierce battlegrounds, communicating only through extended song titles and subtle ambience. Chirping of birds or crickets immediately transports the listener to the mystical world of Hearth while warm, punchy synthesisers draw them ever deeper in. Occasionally however, the immersion is broken when the relatively short tracks finish a little abruptly, perhaps this is intentional, bringing the listener back to the tavern as our protagonist is jolted back to his humdrum work, on the other hand it would’ve been nice to spend a little more time with some of the locations around Hearth.

Despite Adventures Across Hearth II: A Night At The Tavern being a mostly instrumental album, MOSS KNIGHT does introduce some soft, lilting vocals for the penultimate track An Absolutely Unwanted Pilgrimage North (One Untouched Bowl Of Rhubarb Ice Cream), deepening the track’s already enveloping atmosphere. Keeping its sounds just as minimalist as the rest of the album, this track layers the sounds of heavy boots trudging through snow and wind rushing through a frosty tundra with delicate keys and an intimate vocal performance. While many of the other tracks stand tall without vocals, the performance here does a lot to elevate the song from merely another rich soundscape to one of the album’s strongest moments.

While the immediate reaction to MOSS KNIGHT’s music may be nostalgia, the project provides a much more immersive experience than even the best of the 16-bit era that its smooth, pleasant synths are reminiscent of. Bringing the listener deep into the magical world of Hearth, Adventures Across Hearth II: A Night At The Tavern provides the same cosy feel as getting lost in a well written fantasy novel by the fire on a rainy day with only minimalist synths and carefully crafted ambience.

Rating: 7/10

Adventures Across Hearth II: A Night At The Tavern is out now via Fiadh Productions.

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