Review Summary: Lucy, it’s time to mosh-ka.
Lucy. Lucinda. Lucille. Lucy is a dime a dozen name; a peak name of the late 1800s and again circa 1950. Is this really the last of Lucy? Nay. Lucy is just getting started. Lucy will likely outlast us all. But that’s a pretty left-field name for a death metal band right? No references to fire, death, satanic worship or even the lower intestine (thanks,
fat ed’s guide to metal). Needless to say I haven’t come across these jazz-cum-death[core?] metal nerds before the likes of Transcending Obscurity announced
Moksha earlier in the year. I mean I was intrigued, mostly because of the quirky name, pink-tinged artwork and the expectation of balls-to-the-walls deathcore while the presser listed some of modern death metal’s more palatable heavyweights in the ‘read if you like’ section (Inferi, Archspire, The Zenith Passage). As such, I pulled up my dacks, adjusted the glasses on the bridge of my nose and leapt right into it.
The album’s title track, which leads the onslaught blasts and snarls with abandon. Where
Ashvattha was known for its tendency to avant jazz notes into grinding death metal motifs, “Moksha” is a transparent bludgeoner, meat and bones swung wildly from mechanical arms. “Agni” is similarly straight-forwards; its breakneck speeds enunciating the band’s further departure from weirder genre smashups. That’s fine; but
speed seems to be the main ingredient of the day, dropped off the truck in volume.
Moksha is a brief thirty minutes overall—but it doesn’t have to be. There are some great ideas here that could be better fleshed out if only these guys took a moment to smell the otherworldly alien luminescent slime. “Aforethought”, the shortest track after the introduction is a hammer of growls, blast beats and modern technical death metal aesthetic and yet the brocore back riffs (those slower ones) of the track just tickle atmospherics, wasted. If The Last Of Lucy really took a moment or two to really think about what they were doing, there’d be more graceful swings like the tail end of “Ego Death” or an expansion of the ominous tones that announce “Ritual Of The Abraxas”.
Unfortunately,
Moksha is too strung out by the same ideas to be really impactful in today’s more modern tech death. Those acts mentioned above do provide some bearing for The Last Of Lucy’s soundscapes, but comparatively,
Moksha falls much shorter than the expectation; sidestepping wholesome songwriting and replacing it with run of the mill death metal motifs that neither lift or drop the album’s overall quality.
Moksha’s latter half runs into much of the same stylistic issues as the songs before it and as such, the tracks are
interchangeable and not for the better. To measure a saving grace however, is the record’s overall brevity. Had this album been any longer than thirty minutes in this style the temptation to tune out would’ve massively outweighed the appeal. As such the record could be likened to Schrödinger's cat and is much the banger of a record as it is not. Lucy might outlast this generation and the next.
Moksha however, will be forgotten in a matter of hours.
