To follow blindly is unwise. One should always question the path they walk. But the path we’re tasked to follow during the debut album by Swedish duo Alex Stjernfeldt and Victor Wegeborn, collectively known as The Moth Gatherer, is so compelling that no questions need to be asked. Sometimes it’s better to be swept up and taken away.
It’s the musical and emotional unpredictability of A Bright Celestial Light that makes it so compelling, and leaves its sound difficult to categorise. Shifting freely between hardcore, progressive and post-metal, but always with a glorious sense of expression, the arrangements are capable of both mountainous weight and heartbreaking beauty. Throughout its 45 minutes impenetrable density is carefully unravelled and tapered to form delicate and demonstrative ends that will leave you aching in more ways than one.
Opener ‘The Water We All Come To Need’ blends a lumbering pace with explosive intensity. Despite raw vocals and aggressive use of distortion befitting of sludge metal, it maintains a sense mourning without inviting accusations of dissonance.
Stjernfeldt and Wegeborn really prove their worth during the incredible ‘Intervention’. At both its quietest and most sedate and its loudest and most contentious, its emotional potency ensures it’s never bathetic. Benefitting from its less erratic, sometimes sparse arrangement, it expertly extracts maximum emotion from its slight guitar and gentle use of delay before reintroducing its powerful but no less evocative rhythm section for its rousing final third.
Used in a constrained yet expressive way, smatterings of synth are heard throughout the record, and are particularly effective between bouts of raging guitar on ‘A Road of Gravel and Skulls’. Led by its fierce vocals, the track switches between light and dark several times before its stunted finish.
The sullen and the sinister collide on ‘The Womb, The Woe, The Woman’. Heavy driving grooves steer toward several spacious interludes that afford the track extreme space, creating an inviting sound. In the midst of such divergence, the track, and the album, could’ve sounded messy and incomplete. But the cohesion between these massive shifts in volume and style demonstrate the absolute control Stjernfeldt and Wegeborn have over the direction of their music.
Revisiting the frailty that lent ‘Intervention’ such emotional credence, finale ‘A Falling Deity’ carries a crawling pace and heady atmosphere, bolstered by sharp lead guitar and somber piano. Despite being an instrumental it closes the album in appropriately evocative fashion.
Unpredictable and at times unapologetically inaccessible, A Bright Celestial Light is an expansive, confident and dangerous record that represents an array of emotions and musical subgenres with hedonistic intent. Carefully considered dynamic shifts maintain a progressive feel and ensure the album is rewarding through repeated listens. Its winding and hypnotic compositions spiral deeper and deeper into progressive rabbit holes, inviting the listener to follow. But don’t question the direction. Sometimes it’s better to be swept up and taken away.
8/10
Sean McGeady