moonshine

This self-titled debut from Baltimore's MOONSHINE opens with a gnarly swampy sludge chug w/ harmonized guitar attack that would make CROWBAR proud, setting the stage for their extremely heavy,moody, and often haunting sludge/doom/crust assault. Rising from the ashes of local bands WAKE UP ON FIRE and INURE, this is closer in spirit to the tribalist, apocalyptic crustcore-meets-post rock of WAKE UP ON FIRE, but MOONSHINE gets WAY slower and heavier, mixing crushingly heavy sludgecore n' crawling Doom metal with frontwoman Mis' sickening vocals (sort of like a cross between Edgy from BURNING WITCH and Amy from NAUSEA ) as well as some neat and unexpected shifts in musical direction. Like when the band's superdirge bottoms out, revealing a weird, smoky blues break with Mis' eerie crooning. Or the AWESOME reverb-drenched moments where MOONSHINE starts sounding like a ragged, ghostly COWBOY JUNKIES, right before unleashing monster doomcrust riffs again in a thunderstorm of amp damage and gooey blastbeats. Loaded with epic, grandiose guitarwork, this is a cool mix of Southern Lord-style extreme Doom, the sort of psychedelic neo-crustcore that has been coming out of Baltimore for the past few years (a gooey, atonal buzz heavily influenced by those Cali hemp wizards DYSTOPIA), and grimy, grungy, Southern-rock tinged sludge like EYEHATEGOD, RWAKE and BUZZOV*EN.

moonshine