Moab, not normally my cup of tea for sure, but there’s something about these Los Angeles based Doom/Stoner/Psych rockers that is timeless. So 5 years after their last release and despite the tragic loss of their drummer Erik Herzog mid-way through production ‘Trough’ might just be their most complete record to date.
What you get here is ten tracks, that despite their Doomy and downbeat essential nature, manage to say a lot about the genesis of what we used to call ‘heavy metal’ but now seem obsessed with tagging with a million different genre tags. This is at it’s heart what Sabbath were doing – taking Blues and adding to it an aggression and a bottom end that exaggerated things to such an extent that it sounded new.
Moab do the same by taking that base and throwing in a host of other sounds like the deep, psychedelic and spacey sounds of opening track ‘Skeptic’s Lament’ and whilst you could argue that tracks like ‘Into the Sea Swine’ owe rather a lot to Ozzy-era Sabbath elsewhere there’s more of a Fu Manchu meets High on Fire or Earthless.
Honestly as the album progresses you’ll get lost in it: ‘All Automations’ carries that same sound further, and its about that time you realise how great the production sounds here.
Elsewhere there’s plenty more to get that head nodding with hardly a moment wasted and so much packed into the relatively short running times of most tracks. ‘Fifty Thousand Tons’ is wonderful and chock full of guitar; and both the crawling ‘Moss Grows Where No One Goes’ and the chunky ‘The Onus’ deliver too.
The penultimate track ‘Turnin’ Slow’ may even be the best here, tough the final song, ‘Fend For Dawn’ and its harder, more aggressive sound is another string contender.
With the situation as it is it’s hard to say if we will hear more, but f this is their swansong they really went out with a bang.
