Review Summary: On their debut album, New York hard rock band Moon Tooth, through a blend of different pallets, reveal themselves as a promising act for the future with Chromaparagon.
In this day and age, standing out from your peers can be fairly hard. Trends set up a yellow brick road to success, while underground affairs become funded by the accessibility of the internet. Differentiating oneself from competition is, in the end, what makes a band great in the first place. On their debut album, New York hard rock band
Moon Tooth, through a blend of different pallets, reveal themselves as a promising act for the future with
Chromaparagon.
Most easily explained as a fusion of blues, rock, and heavy metal influences,
Moon Tooth step over many musical boundaries in the quest for a characteristic. While the band does not exactly experiment with structures enough to be seen as a progressive quartet, sing-a-long melodies over rambunctious harmonies and stoned guitarists allow them to stand out. Though comparisons can definitely be drawn to
Mastodon,
Moon Tooth seems more upfront about their poppier side, with vocalist John Carbone providing some seriously catchy chorus's. The band also strives for different contrasts throughout numerous tracks on the album. Track three and four for instance contains a more stoner metal approach to music, while
Queen Wolf could be seen as one of the best pop rock melodies of the year thus far, and
Forgive Me Snake Ryder is driven by pure punk mentalities. This level of variety and individuality is definitely rare on a debut record, and while some people might argue that it's too far to call this a progressive rock album, this could at the very least be put into the alternative category.
While
Moon Tooth are pretty convincing in selling their style of musicality, there is a big problem. In the cooperation of aesthetically different soundscapes, the band has spread themselves too thin, and fails to specialize in one area or the other. Creativity isn't a bad thing by any means, but focusing on so many different substances has ironically dulled the experience and made it fairly mundane, when it was supposed to spice things up in the first place.
Moon Tooth doesn't excel at thrilling shifts in tempo or heavy grandiose epics like their peers, they are kind of just there. Though intentions were of the best kind - it's clear that trying to do so much on a first time effort has made them ultimately do so little. Still, a recommended album. Just a bit bland after a while.
