ALBUM REVIEW: The Moon Has Fallen – AlithiA

Australian progressive rock outfit ALITHIA have returned with their second album, The Moon Has Fallen. While the band have had a lengthy career, starting in 2004, the band have prioritised touring and connecting with their music with a live audience over pushing new music each year. In that time, they’ve risen as a band with a real emotional heart and talent. Will this latest album demonstrate their live power in this experimental album?

A tempered and ambient start for The Sun, as natural soundscapes of wind and feedback set the scene for the echoing guitars. The waves of sound that run under the riff are ethereal, high and sweet, tinkling keys and instrumental notes that are hard to pin down. all the while the heart of the song lives in the beat and the guitar melody, bending strings and a heartbeat tempo. Things build a positive, and descend into something stranger. The vocals only make an appearance around the halfway mark, allowing the mental landscape you’ve been constructing to take full effect before ALITHIA finally start telling their story. It’s incredibly dynamic from the off, flowing into all kinds of alien ideas and begins the chronicles of this scope

Breathe begins life as a laid back piano work at it’s rawest. In an instant, it’s evolved into a piece of monumental force, with some considerable drum work from Mark ‘Vel’ Vella that patters into your mind as the alternate chug and vibrato of guitars. New guitarist Nguyen Phambam fits perfectly into this complex weave of styles and ideas. The lyrics are pivotal in understanding the dramatic changes this song takes, from big guitar moments to quitter parts where a chorus of voices take control and heave the momentum towards a bittersweet kind of balance.

For those unversed in ALITHIA’s work, there’s a mixture of the Norwegian post rock band SPURV and the infamous Blade Runner composer Vangelis. There are moments of eerie loneliness in the synth, in a the feeling of future and emptiness, while the ringing guitars and naturalistic, very human drums ground things in the now.

With a very pagan sounding name like Faces in the Leaves, with instant ideas of the Green Man coming into play, this song is evocative of premonition and nomadic travel. A fuzz of synth keys bobs in and out of earshot, like a memory on the edge of memory, or an intuition of a future that might lie ahead. The drums thunk with a weighty might, the vocals carry a tune as airy as the wind. Suddenly things take a sharp shift from the naturalistic to a very dark and dangerous symphonic style, the rhythm takes on a very different tone and the general sense of unease that pulses even into the vocal delivery.

We have a completely new and funky dynamic to catch your ear for the start of Empress. A bouncing bassline from Tibor Gede whips up a groove as those electronic sounds build like a cloud about to burst. Smatterings of a riff trickle through, before the interjection of the vocals. Lyrically it’s a real strong contender for the best on show here, it’s instantly understandable on an emotional level and catchy to boot. Harmonic cries and heartfelt lyrics give way to a stonking duo of that suggested guitar riff and an ambiences of complex synth melody. The dance between guitars, monstrously dark synth and the slamming difference between the hard to soft to hard vocals creates a monumental drive and rawness to such a jam-packed song.

To twist into a slow groove of chilled out beats and slowed down guitars is a bold move after such an explosion, but that’s exactly what we get with Blood Moon. Vocals almost sighed, the lyrics calling to gentleness, as John Rousvanis‘ cries take on an almost ballad like quality in places. There’s something of an eighty’s quality to this production, not just because of its nostalgic use of keys, but the big drum sounds and the specific vocal effects. However, for the most part the vocals are just another vessel for the message of danger on the horizon, and as the track ups the tempo, the sense of urgency to what is being said feel like one musical body to one message. The quiet demise of the song is the finesse of emotional writing that puts ALITHIA up as one of the most masterful bands creating experimental music at the moment.

Menacingly, we come to Three Eyes, where an instant shamanistic idea is drawn to mind, in the tone of the ringing piano, that both haunts and denotes an empty feeling of mistakes and . drums are pounding with an irregularity to match the shouted song. This is more a protest song, an incantation of regret and mistakes. Jeffrey Ortiz Raul Castro and Danny Constantino really take control of the discontent in this track, with dynamic percussion and keys being the force that dominates this track. It’s hugely emotional and serves as both a warning and a lament of things that are, things that have been and things to come.

Penultimately Diamonds is a chunky, bass driven track. While the band have stated that no effort was made to showcase any one musician on any song, there’s always a moment that each individual shines through this album. With this unconscious movement allowing the band to take steps back and forward into the limelight, it’s apparent that this album is a true collaborative effort that has the full passion of each player fully locked in. Diamond, with it’s punchy, techno sentiments in the synthwave style melody, the dark and dangerous tone of the guitars, singing out and riffing hard, the crashing drums and raw vocals, amounts to a piece of music that can play around with ambient space, or fill it to capacity with intricate ideas in a technical and progressive manner. It’s all masterfully done, and you’re at the complete mercy of what ALITHIA wants you to feel.

Finally we come to The Knife, where once again we’re called back to the calm piano as a sanctuary. This short closing song is a lullaby of layered singing, tapping symbols and patting drums. The guitars are warm and breathable, the bass low and almost out of reach. This dreamlike end to the intensity of the album is a welcome conclusion on this topsy-turvy ride, and gives a nice moment of reflection.

This album takes the mass amount of scope and drive of ALITHIA and condenses it into a dense, emotional experience that compresses the very notion of progressive rock into a new dimension. The Moon Has Fallen is highly innovative, expressive playing that doesn’t compromise the emotional heart and weight of its songs. If anything, the passion of each song allows the complex flow between naturalistic playing and ambient synth to intertwine beautifully as one solid music vessel.

Rating: 8/10

The Moon Has Fallen is out now via Wild Thing Records.

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