Red Moon Architect "Emptiness Weighs the Most" Review

 

Awash in synthesizer, reverby clean guitars, and vocals ranging from tender female-sung melodies to forceful, animalistic snarls, Red Moon Architect returns with a fuller and increasingly modern production style behind their sound. 

 

    The Finnish doomers that are the subject of this review have only popped up on my radar recently - maybe thanks to a new advertising budget with their new label Noble Demon? Whatever the case, after listening to Rise and especially One Shines Brighter off of this release, I thought it appropriate to go back and give some of their older material a listen. In brief, this record is both a deviation from their most recent music - Kuura, a decidedly blacker, funeral-doom release, was just last year - and a 'return to form'. Listen to one of the tracks from Fall, the band's sophomore effort, and hear the similarities. It's fair to say that these guys have managed to cover a lot of musical ground since their first full-length in 2012, and even their material that I found less interesting personally, would still definitely be worth a listen. 

    The album opens with the sounds of water, or perhaps a storm - deep, horn-like synth and dramatic, slow piano creates a melancholic mood. This fades nicely into Chained, the first 'proper' track of the album with its' octave melody line and strange power chord progression. One of the more notable aspects of Emptiness, outside of its' more clean, high budget production values in comparison to previous records, is the sort of continuous or 'flowing' nature of the album. While I've yet to see all of the lyrics for this record - only some of them are available online - they do not seem to suggest a concept album, but merely a unified sound. In any case, one track flows nicely into the next throughout the entire record, and when going back for repeat listens I didn't feel any sense of fatigue or desire to take a break after any of the tracks. Rise's final chorus and triumphant guitar solo lead into ethereal arpeggiated guitar and Anni Viljanen's spirit-in-the-woods delivery on Dethrone the Darkness, which forms a sort of depressive two-parter with One Shines Brighter in my mind. 

    On the vocals, too - whenever an extreme metal band (or any metal band for that matter) has a female singer, it often forms the basis of their sound. This can give a lot of pause to some of the more traditionally-minded metal nerds out there like me, who may view things like Nightwish, Within Temptation or Evanescence with some apprehension. The fear is often that a band may lose its' edge or attempt to overly-commercialize their sounds due to the more inviting nature of the female voice. While Red Moon Architect have leaned into a sound that is more accessible here than on Kuura, female-driven vocals seem to have worked their way into their music very naturally. And, of course, the record is about half harshes in a strangely guttural style that I can't quite exactly place. It's low and death metal as fuck, of course, but there's a certain gravelliness to the male/harsh vocals on this record that actually complement the more melancholy or even sweetly-sad sounding melodies that form the musical foundation of Emptiness. Maybe it's just because he's Finnish? Jokes aside, take a listen to the male/female duet at the end of One Shines Brighter, the strange duality of the approach in Into the Light, or the epic mini-journeys of Muse or Reform to see how these elements play off of each other. I don't normally spend this much time discussing vocals! But they're definitely massively important to the appeal here and could make or break the record for many. As someone with a definite apprehension and even aversion to vocals in general, as well as female vocals, I'd encourage you to give more than a few tracks a try. It very much grew on me. 

    But that doesn't mean we can avoid talking about instrumentation! The guitar/bass/drum 'backbone' here definitely does have a more traditional and even stripped-down compositional approach, with most of the record being power chord progressions played at a slow or middle tempo. When given space to drone, the guitars have a pleasant feedback and are layered nicely in a very black metal 'wall of sound' style. Into the Light's intro has a good demonstration of this, along with a little insight into their style - when the guitar isn't carrying a melody with tremolo picked drones or reverby arepggiated chords, the vocals will do the melodic work, often reinforced with a synth or single-line piano cadence. There is very little musical 'flash' here, with the focus remaining squarely on using the band to create a dark, melodic atmosphere with a great deal of open space. 

    Overall, Emptiness Weighs the Most is probably Red Moon Architect's most accessible album to date, and manages to do so without sacrificing their melodic, melancholy sound - while last year's Kuura is more of the lo-fi, funereal blackened-doom style that I may personally prefer, they manage to create here a more female-oriented record that moves through a series of moods, ending very far from where it started with My Beloved, perhaps the first doom metal ballad ever put to record. The feeling of this record is more one of loneliness - emptiness, even. Unified enough to almost be a concept album but varied enough that you don't feel its' nearly fifty minute runtime. A strong recommend, and if you're into the darker stuff like I am, maybe peep some of their older records too! 

    Favorites: Into the Light, One Shines Brighter, Muse

    You can listen to "Emptiness Weighs the Most" on Red Moon Architect's bandcamp

-Eric