Review Summary: One day my voice will disappear and I'll let the guitar speak for me.
Anybody who keeps themselves relatively informed with the modern post-hardcore/emo scene, mostly run by genre giants Run For Cover and Topshelf Records, is more than likely aware of The World Is A Beautiful Place and I Am No Longer Afraid To Die. Sinforiano Diaz is the moniker under which Thomas Diaz (lead vocalist and keyboard player of The World Is a Beautiful Place) releases brief, hauntingly beautiful tracks without the help of twinkle-daddy king Greg Horbal and company. The Moosup Sessions is a small collection of tracks that Diaz recorded in 2008, and is now seeing a proper cassette release on Broken World Media.
Essentially, The Moosup Sessions sounds like The World Is a Beautiful Place's music in its most stripped down form. It has everything that the post-rock mouthfuls boast, from the beautiful poetry to the subtly intricate song structures. These four tracks are indeed brief, none of them extending over three minutes, but they do indeed leave an impact. "Theme From The Tracks", for example, features a simple electric/acoustic guitar duet that weaves an accompaniment to Diaz' heartfelt travelling narrative. Diaz does differentiate himself from his band in plenty of moments (considering The Moosup Sessions was recorded two years before The World Is a Beautiful Place released their EP, Formlessness), such as the ukulele driven "My Two Months", which has a haunting quality similar to the dense atmosphere of artists such as slowcore legends Carissa's Wierd. The closing/best track, "A Hymn", encompasses everything about Diaz in a nice minute and a half package, being as good, if not better, as anything that The World Is A Beautiful Place has ever put out. The love song, metaphorizing two lovers to two guitars is about as impeccable as this kind of music gets, especially towards the end when "the angels up in heaven lend their voices and sing along". The Moosup Sessions is an interesting insight to the core of The World Is a Beautiful Place, and makes a fantastic prologue for one of the greatest bands in Northwestern America. For a hardcore TWIABP fan, this album is certainly worth a listen, but to any fan of stripped down emo, this is two guitars, always in tune, never needing strings, and fitting together perfectly.
