‘For what it’s worth, I guess it’s wrecked’ intones the Galway songwriter Olan Monk on the opening track of the new Moin album You Never End, and if wrecked sounds like the kind of music you enjoy best then Moin and company will have plenty to offer. Anybody who has ever felt anything thanks to the scoured underbelly and splintering forms of nineties alternative rock will be utterly captivated by You Never End, whether we are talking about grunge icons like Nirvana and the Smashing Pumpkins at their most groove-oriented and grungy, The Breeders and other indie acts gone large, the distorted textures of My Bloody Valentine and their shoegaze precursors and successors, the emergent slowcore of Slint, post-hardcore of Fugazi, slacker rock of the Pavement variety or the minimalist rock-cum-math rock or concrete music of Shellac and Gastr del Sol.
That’s not to say that Moin are derivative, and besides nobody else is making music quite like this in 2024 or as Monk caustically offers, ‘Pull up on the kerb outside, at least what’s left’. With the prolific drummer and composer Valentina Magaletti joining the group as a fully-fledged member from their debut full-length album Moot! in 2021, the trio of Magaletti plus the Raime duo Tom Halstead and Joe Andrews remain somewhat murky with regard to precisely who does what, but amid the electronic mangling and furtive sampling on You Never End it is those roiling guitar textures which are more than ever at the fore.
You Never End breaks more clearly from its predecessors by spotlighting a handful of vocalists from Olan Monk and the conscientious Londoner and Tirzah collaborator Coby Sey to the queasy alchemist and voice manipulator james K and the multidisciplinary artist, writer and filmmaker Sophia Al-Maria. After the grinding and driving, sometimes duelling and droning guitar textures of the first three tracks, ‘What If You Didn’t Need a Reason’ features a twanging guitar and sounds like a more conventional group effort with synthetic reeds carrying the piece along until james K enters, her voice doused in reverb. The result is probably the closest Moin come to shoegaze on You Never End, approximating the My Bloody Valentine nexus of Kevin Shields and Bilinda Butcher and their witheringly overripe Loveless opener ‘Only Shallow’.
But it is the two tracks featuring Sophia Al-Maria which really elevate You Never End, with ‘Family Way’ summoning the spirit of Kim Gordon on such Sonic Youth anthems as ‘The Sprawl’ and ‘Schizophrenia’. On the other hand ‘Lift You’ – which opens with a note of gratitude from Al-Maria, who says ‘I really appreciate this ’cause nobody ever asks to use my voice on a track’ – proves strangely redolent of Baz Luhrmann’s spoken word single ‘Everybody’s Free (To Wear Sunscreen)’ which was ubiquitous in the late-nineties, based upon a text which is often attributed to Kurt Vonnegut but was actually written by the Chicago Tribune columnist Mary Schmich as a faux commencement speech in the summer of 1997.
Well-meaning if a little bit schmaltzy and officious, where Schmich styled her essay as ‘Advice, like youth, probably just wasted on the young’ Al-Maria instead seizes the moment. Backed at first only by Magaletti’s spare kicks and hats, before a piquant yet plaintive and nostalgic guitar line arrives to bronze the composition, Al-Maria expresses herself through a series of infinitives, relaying timeless anxieties tweaked to contemporary ends, from reading in a time of war and worrying about finding oneself ‘on the other side of the border’ to questions of unconditional love, self-worth and community. Somewhere between a soothing balm and a call to arms, ‘Lift You’ recapitulates our collective angst as Al-Maria’s spoken word is progressively emphasised by fraying guitar distortions and a few tunnelling and transportive wind patches.
‘It’s Messy Coping’ takes that feeling and lives in it for a few moments. The musical outlines remain broadly the same across each of the eleven tracks, as wiry and angular guitars wind a course over sawing synths and burbling effects while Magaletti keeps everything coursing along through her careening and lurching percussion. A few synthetic strings and reeds give some of the pieces a more aqueous or limpid quality, but it’s generally about how Moin wield their collective nous, slowing down or staggering the groove and amping up the feedback and other distortions, pulling at their various influences like the scuzziest of threads.
‘C’mon Dive’ is a shimmering groove while ‘Anything But Sopo’ is a knottier instrumental. ‘Happy in the Wrong Way’ sounds alright to me, suggesting that there might be no such thing, while ‘Just Married’ is based around a ghostly field recording where a voice offers a mordant and world-weary treatise on ‘what happens with bands’, bemoaning how they move about and fall apart, a curious Sondheim-esque coda to You Never End which recalls the dizzying anxiety verging on paralysis of the patter song ‘Getting Married Today’ from Company.
