Review: Moloch ‘Bend. Break. Kneel. Crawl.’
British sludge doom titans Moloch have been missing in action for a while, with seven long years passing since their 2019 Love Songs7″ release, but they’ve returned with only their third full-length in almost twenty years of existence.
Their prodigious number of splits aside, that kind of release schedule has always left a Moloch full-length feeling like an event to be celebrated. Well, Bend. Break. Kneel. Crawl is out now through a mix of labels: Dry Cough on cassette, SuperFi on CD, through the band directly on vinyl, and we’ll see if that time away has dulled their nihilistic fury at all. I suspect not…
The torturous riffs of opener In Chrysalis feel as if they’ve been dredged from some blackened swamp, complete with the kind of suffocating atmospheres that would make Godflesh proud. A queasy, roiling groove scrapes underneath a nihilistic scream, making way for bleak, cold, clean guitar interludes which, in turn, provide a bleak foil for the sheer doom that cakes everything.
Bend. Break. Kneel. Crawl is an album of suffering; an album built on the pain that all humans must endure, and an expression of the darkness we can find in ourselves. The Bunker is a merciless, almost martial industrial stomp towards oblivion, beset by squalling feedback like a classic EyeHateGod track, while Slowly Chewing Umbilical is jagged and more uneven, yet ferociously intense in its delivery. Moloch are incredibly pissed off about something, and it shows in their focused, merciless assault on the senses.
It is suffocating, it is caustic, it is uncompromising, and it fucking rules…
There’s no evolution, no deviation from the core of their dragging, sludgy oppression, and it is almost impressively one-dimensional. But who needs deviation when the original sound is so pure of intent and so well fitting? Not me. I’d happily drown in the black tar riffs of Another Family Slaughters Itself In The Countrysideforever, such is the blood-itching hunger it showcases, or in the Godfleshian nightmare of 16.03.13. Closer Mother Medusa slowly grinds everything to a halt, where it feels that all the light has been snuffed out, and we are left with only darkness and pain.
There has been something about the British underground sludge and doom scenes for a while now, spewing out some of the most uncompromisingly heavy and ugly bands into a world seemingly heralding their coming with how fucked up everything is. But Moloch have been doing this a long time, and it shows on Bend. Break. Kneel. Crawl that there is still room for it to get heavier and uglier. This is an album that feels one or two steps away from the primordial Albion ooze that excreted all the misery of today. It is suffocating, it is caustic, it is uncompromising, and it fucking rules. Moloch haven’t missed a beat.
Label: Dry Cough Records | SuperFi Records | Independent
Band Links: Bandcamp | Instagram
Scribed by: Sandy Williamson
