ALBUM REVIEW: Heavy Heart – Moor
Straddling the mighty River Elbe and two of its tributaries, the River Alster and the River Bille, the sweeping metropolitan city of Hamburg is one of Europe’s largest cities. It is also home to the driving, pummelling sound of doom quintet MOOR. Embodying catharsis through pain, the band’s guttural doom is raw, emotive and powerful. Yet it doesn’t wade in misery, it instead offers a form of redemption. Heavy Heart is their debut album and it comes from an incredibly vulnerable place. An intense mix of emotions is woven into the album, ranging from complete desolation and despair to an overpowering yearning and intimacy. Heavy Heart promises hulking riffs and heavy, atmospheric walls of sound that resemble the slow, shuffling trudge of death.
With a sound that more closely resembles and follows the formula laid down OMEGA MASSIF and NEUROSIS, Heavy Heart is much bleaker in comparison to the BLACK SABBATH-inspired stoner grooves of many of their contemporaries. As a result, this is a primal sound that comes from deep within the earth, once again being dragged into sunlight to unleash a plethora of instinctive and visceral emotions upon you.
In more ways than one, Heavy Heart is an elegy to those dark places that you go within yourself as well as for those that have since departed us. It isn’t overly brutal or fantastically beautiful, rather it is a reflection on the bleak nature of real life and how it gives with one hand and takes with the other. Within two weeks of recording the album two of MOOR’s founding members were diagnosed with cancer, guitarist Ben Laging and co-founding bassist Christian Smukal. Sadly, Smukal lost his battle, yet his final recordings have become a powerful farewell letter to the world.
While there is contextually a significant amount of grief and hurt surrounding Heavy Heart, it is an album that is alluring and grotesque at the same time. Not for the faint of heart, it is music that requires you to face life and embrace it, including all its darkness, despair and bleakness. It will take you to places within yourself and make you shine a light on those shadows that you hide deep within, ruthlessly reminding us of the cruel nature of life while simultaneously offering catharsis as the weight of your burdens is lifted up by the sheer force of MOOR’s riffing.
Yet while the album can be abrasive in its approach, and its overarching theme and concept will no doubt resonate with many of us that have gone through the turmoil of grief and despair with the cruelty of life, sadly Heavy Heart doesn’t really offer much else. Whilst it is heavily atmospheric, the album lacks any real variation. Everything seems to trudge along at a similar pace and after a few listens it really struggles to retain your attention, which is disheartening in some ways, because you can hear the potential that MOOR have patiently waiting to be expanded on but ultimately it doesn’t really go anywhere, and as a result just fades out into nothingness.
Opening with the title track, you can feel the weight of turmoil circling around you, a hulking, brooding riff accompanied by the bellowing vocals of Ercüment Kasala, and the scene is set for the rest of the album. Pale Grey Snow follows in a similar vein, with a surprising and very brief clean atmospheric section that you wait for to come again but instead the song descends into tremolo picking black metal style. With the band’s distortion there is something cold and black metal-esque about the album but it’s never really explored fully. Tears From Acrid Smoke has a strange, eerie introduction with unintelligible words that sends a chill down your spine before a distorted cymbal hit gathers momentum and MOOR continue their trudging riffs.
Interlude track Void offers a brief respite from the relentlessly crunchy riffing, exploring the band’s atmospheric side. It’s creepy and spine tingling, yet it leaves you wanting more of this kind of thing throughout the album, as it ties in better with MOOR’s conceptual themes of life’s cruelty. Restless and Under Your Wings bleed into one another to make a homogenous passage of deep fuzz and drones amongst discordant riffs. By the time you get to Breath Like Nails your ears are truly fatigued; the nine-minute epic however offers softer moments through the distortion and some beautiful plucked melodies. This is a stand out track as it shows the variation and dynamic shifts that MOOR are capable of, and what you wanted to hear more of throughout the album.
MOOR have definitely made a raw and uncompromising album, yet Heavy Heart doesn’t quite hit the notes that you want it too, and as a result it leaves you feeling quite indifferent to it. However, the band have shown some potential that they can hopefully capitalise on next time round.
Rating: 6/10
Heavy Heart is set for release on May 17th via Blood Blast Distribution/Believe Digital.
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