Mosara

I’ll be honest, I didn’t fall in love with Mosara on my first listen. This is not one of those doom albums. In the first place, the band stated that this self-titled debut album was “recorded and mixed sans computer software”, which wouldn’t be troublesome in a general sense, though definitely points to the atavism that lies at the heart of the music. Despite the Aztec temple on the cover, the atmosphere that I was expecting never turns out to be atavistic in terms of ancient and mysterious feels, but precisely the kind of “basic” template that stings a bit if you listen to it early in the morning. (And that’s what I’m doing.) The recording sounds like a slap in the face, with gravelly guitars, grunting bass, and a dry smack from the drums, though it’s the vocals that pose me the largest issue.

And they get a paragraph to themselves. The singer (supposedly 2 appear on this release, but I’d wager one features much more than the other) has an unfortunate tendency to sound like he’s drunk and yelling at his neighbour, such is the bare grit of it. In this case, I hear this kind of singing more often from sludge acts (even those anomalous bands like Rabies Caste and Fudge Tunnel), and sometimes it works when bleeding through a massive wall of distortion, but remember I said everything here already sounds raw and rough? So it’s like you’ve been woken up early, your neighbour is yelling, and somehow you have concrete instead of coffee in your cup. However, doing all my reconsidering after realizing the Mosara experience doesn’t really accord with my expectations, I can see how they’ve used some spiky features to better delineate the music as a whole, plus the lead guitar does more “talking” than the vocals as it often comes out with slightly psychedelic effects that feel much smoother than the rest of the mix. Besides, not all the songs feature many vocals: case in point is ‘Oumuamua’, which only has a very brief outburst around the middle of its 6 minutes.

The jamming element of Mosara proves perhaps its best feature, even if several riffs also work pretty well after a few listens. Most songs have enough time to unwind in a single direction as they ebb towards 7 minutes, so long sections of instrumental time in ‘Earth God’ and ‘Cypher’ counteract those yelled verses, while the back end of the release does away almost entirely with singing, closer ‘Cocoliztli’ being an actual instrumental that touches on a few tribal references that I thought might have been more common. In general, the songs work in a similar way though, opening proceedings with a rather groovy doom riff that can choose between 3 different speeds of slow, then the structure becomes hazy as lead ideas are thrown around, along with other jamming features. The grinding riffs have some of that thick, monolithic sound that I totally love in big doom, though it’s hard to put my finger on what sort of doom it could be compared to: it’s absolutely pure, yet as heavy as some bands touching on sludge and death splits, while it certainly goes past anything you would think of as “classic” in terms of pure, mean heaviness. In the leads, I do once recognize a particular reference, and unfortunately it’s very funny, because I can’t see why Mosara would start jamming an Oasis lick about 5 minutes into ‘Majestik XII’.

It took a bit of time to appreciate the quality of Mosara, but it’s certainly there for those who can reconcile the basic approach with some freeform ideas. Despite sounding great at their normal, slow, crushing speed, ‘Fear Merchant’ demonstrates that picking up the pace can be a good tactic too, as parts of this song steamroll right through the middle of my earphones and hopefully take my neighbour out in the process. As you can tell, the only catch for me are the vocals, which I can understand but not bring myself to love. Mosara should have gone more Stone Age and less mind-blowing ‘70s gig if they had wanted to include those.