2023-04-29 12:24:24
Black Bay is the debut album of the um Mogwai-man Stuart Braithwaite formed Scottish post-rock and slow-core septets (which can only be pinned down to these stylistic cornerstones in the narrowest sense). Silver Moth.
Next to Braithwaite (guitar, keyboards, synthesizer) and his wife Elisabeth Elektra (vocals). Silver Moth with Evi Vine (guitar, vocals), Steven Hill (bass), Matthew Rochford (guitar), Ash Babb (drums, percussion) and Ben Roberts (cello) personally, experientially (with bands like Abrasive Trees, Burning House, Prosthetic Head or The Eden House in the CVs) and especially on the string front – and use this basis with self-confident competence to explore a spectrum that is as homogeneous as it is complex.
Henry is at its core classic, tradition-conscious post-rock, which, with elegiacly intertwined guitars and wide arcs of tension, melancholic melodies and thoughtfully sparkling patina, as well as an ethereal breath of voice between Beth Gibbons, Elizabeth Fraser and Martina Topley Bird, defines the essence of the record with pounding vehemence, while the epic, almost sacred The Eternal aimed at the dreamy pathos of the alternative with the aesthetics of shoegaze and dreampop – but without really letting the promised climax detonate. Mother Tongue shades the sound of Black Bay surreal to psychedelic dark folk with latent goth undertones, only to muse contemplatively, gently falling into the trance of a bluesy groove, which sounds a bit like the group dozing imaginatively and strumming fleetingly somnambulist from the hallucination of a jazz cellar, in which the visions of space rock are projected into dense clouds of smoke.
Gaelic Psalm creates picturesque images of the pillars of an old boat dock waiting in the fog for treacherous waters, caressed at night by the tired waves of a filthy sewer, and observes the waters embraced by the night until the scenario becomes a poem recitation by Rochford spooky dissolves. Hello Doom starts there taking over as have Crippled Black Phoenix the essence of Mogwai Fear Satan with My Father My King adapted to create a hypnotically creeping out-of-jam monolith whose final third of the 15-minute running time sees every physical power and might slip into a disembodied seance.
It all happens just as casually, mutating organically and instinctively as if the core could be an Ethereal Wave foreshadowing of Kraut-Odyssey, whose chamber play transcends with a cinematographically suggested panorama, but refrains from the really compelling exhaustion of its melodramatic-sad motives, and how much here works almost in an ambient way – especially as a closer but also a bit underwhelmingly dismissed.
One can admire the otherworldly beauty of Black Bay At the most, however, one can accuse the six tracks bundled as an album of not becoming more than the sum of the individual song parts in all phases and thus only partially satisfyingly opening up the indicated potential of the group (only presumably they flattened everything appropriately impressively live).
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