Review Summary: A great effort from a one man band and already on top of my list of records of 2010.
I first heard of Mose Giganticus a few months ago when I heard they got signed to Relapse. In my dictionary Relapse = Quality, so I had to check out this band. The older songs on their Myspace page were okay but didn’t really impress me. Then I selected ‘The Left Path’, the song from their upcoming album, which came blasting out of the speakers and simply blew me away. Once again Relapse acknowledged why I have such faith in them. It opened with a simple and straightforward riff similar to Mastodon’s Blood and Thunder, but then the melody line kicked in and it wasn’t sludge, metal, hard-rock, prog or sympho but some ultimate melting pot of all those styles.
Their Myspace page says Metal/Grunge/Live electronics, but that doesn’t do their sound justice. Think Mastodon playing Blood and Thunder style riffs, but using their Crack the Skye sound and atmosphere, then mix in some synths to create a huge anthemic sound and sometimes even some spacey vocals through a vocoder and you’ll have a good idea of the sound that Mose Giganticus produces.
Gift Horse is a metal album with grooving hard-rock riffs, great prog-like epic songs and synths that add to the grandness of the sound, yet this still feels like a band that knows their sludge and is never trying to be anything big or fancy. From the epic verses of ‘The Left Path’ and ‘Days of Yore’ to the driving power riffs of ‘Demon Tusk’ and ‘The Great Deceiver’, Gift Horse just declared itself my ‘Record of 2010’.
The only negative thing I can say about this album is that it’s too short! It has only 7 songs and doesn’t even reach the half hour mark. But then again that just means I can play this amazing record twice an hour. And that’s exactly what I’m going to do for the next couple of hours. And if you like Mastodon or Baroness and you don’t mind a little synth action so should you.
